Every month or so for the past year and some change, Cristina Cacioppo, programmer at 92YTribeca has been good enough to locate and screen a 35mm film print of a title determined by myself and my fellow guest programmer, Film Comment’s Nic Rapold, for a little shindig that goes by the name ‘Overdue.’
During our tenure as guest programmers, the successes—a sold-out black-clad crowd for The Cure in Orange, a double-bill of director Larry Yust’s features that seemed to truly wow all present—have just about equaled the disappointments—the print of Andre de Toth’s Play Dirty that had mellowed to the color of Pepto Bismol, the Joe Don Baker mini-retro that New York City was apparently not crying out for, the screening of James Gunn’s Squirm attended by exactly no-one, including the hosts. For whatever reason, Cristina has kept inviting us back—this despite her having recently called me “unsavory” while in her cups at a holiday party.
I am not sure what she meant by this, though I think it was meant affectionately. Possibly it has something to do with my having the fashion sense of a giallo strangler, or my having been fascinated at an impressionable age by John Larroquette’s Dan Fielding on Night Court, or my championing of movies like the highly unsavory James Woods vehicle Cop (1988), which we screened last night to a scanty but responsive audience.
Cop’s writer-director, James B. Harris, extracted the film’s story from the larger framework of James B. Ellroy’s 1984 novel “Blood on the Moon.” Altogether there have been a dozen Ellroy adaptations, most notably Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential and Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia, but Cop was the first.
I’d first heard of Cop from a friend in France. Bertrand Tavernier and Pierre Rissient hold the film in high regard, and for all I know it may be universally acknowledged as a masterpiece over there. (In Emmanuel Bordieu’s 2006 Les amitiés maléfiques, it’s a fun detail that Thibault Vinçon’s know-it-all intellectual bully is an Ellroy expert.) In fact, if I’d had my druthers, yesterday’s screening would’ve been a double-bill with Maurice Pialat’s Police (1985), another essential ‘80s cop pic which had audiences gasping when a street hood spat square in the face of Sophie Marceau, La Boum’s teen queen—imagine a similar desecration of Molly Ringwald! (Or find yourself a copy of Godard’s King Lear, also recently at 92YTribeca.)
I was further intrigued on the subject of Harris by fellow SundanceNOW columnist Michael Atkinson’s definitive essay on his sporadic-but-pungent career, “Genuine B Noir: James B. Harris,” in which he called Cop the director’s “best and nastiest.” The piece is included Mr. Atkinson’s book Ghosts in the Machine: Speculating on the Dark Heart of Pulp Cinema, which you really should own if you do not already.
The films that he directed aside, Harris’s place in film history is secure thanks to an early association with another auteur. Fresh out of the Army, Harris was in the business of licensing films to TV broadcasters, in which capacity he was approached by an acquaintance, Stanley Kubrick, then attempting to get a few bucks for his Fear & Desire (which was recently released on Blu-ray by Kino International). This led to a professional producer-director partnership, Harris-Kubrick, with Harris going on to produce The Killing (whose source novel, Lionel White’s Clean Break, he had picked out and acquired the rights to), Paths of Glory, and Lolita, before embarking on a filmmaking career of his own beginning with the 1965 nuclear submarine picture The Bedford Incident. From the get-go, there was a queer dialogue between Harris’s films and Kubrick’s; as Atkinson notes, Harris’s debut “showed the strain of having to stand shivering in the shadow cast by Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.” The influence, however, was not one-sided: you could make quite the double-feature of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Harris’s second film, 1973’s Some Call it Loving (also variously titled Sleeping Beauty and The Castle), which those of you in New York may see as part of BAM’s Richard Pryor retrospective on February 13th.
As for the rest of Harris’s career as writer-director, the Jim Thompson-penned The Killing, and mid-century noir in general, are pertinent points of reference. With 1982’s Fast-Walking, starring Woods as prison guard “Fast-Walking” Miniver, Harris entered the nearest thing to a period of steady work in his directing career, though he’s yet to helm a single, solitary hit. Fast-Walking was followed by Cop and, in 1993, Boiling Point, with Dennis Hopper and Wesley Snipes, who, as I never tire of reminding anyone who will listen, was once a very exciting leading man. Although he had an executive producer credit on Black Dahlia, Boiling Point was Harris’s last film as a director. He will be 85 years old this year, and is quite sharp in a seemingly-new interview recorded for Criterion’s 2011 DVD release of The Killing. James B. Harris Productions still keeps an office in Beverly Hills, and they will return your phone calls.
Back to Cop: Woods, also one of the films’s producers, stars as Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins, a LAPD homicide detective who, investigating the brutal murder of a woman, begins to suspect that it’s the work of a serial killer who’s been plying his trade for the last fifteen years or so. Ellroy made a trilogy of books with the Hopkins character, and there is some scuttlebutt that Harris and Woods intended to make further Hopkins films, though Cop’s “disappointing” box-office put an end to any such notion.
The slim box-office was almost certainly attributable to the outright curled-lip nastiness, the unmitigated horndog skeeviness, with which Woods plays the lead. A lot of people don’t care for Woods the man, for he is a mouthy right-winger in an industry that leans left, but as an actor this seeming indifference to being liked, this reluctance to pump the audience for sympathy, is a rare gift. Even more rare is finding a director, like Harris, willing to take full advantage of it. It was reconfirmed for me just how rare this is only this week: In anticipation of the upcoming Jason Statham Parker film, I re-viewed previous movies adapted from Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s novels about his Parker character, written as a pitiless man-machine, seeing in the process how so many interpretations (Jim Brown, Mel Gibson, Peter Coyote) insisted on garlanding Parker with little sprigs of humanity.
The sole humanizing agent in Hopkins’s life is his little daughter, with whom Woods appears in exactly one scene, telling her “bedtime stories” ripped from his case histories. When Hopkins’s wife upbraids him, he rebuts that he’s only preparing the girl for the world, that by protecting her from fairy tales he is protecting her from:
“Expectations, the greatest woman killer of all-time, a terminal disease that starts way back when they’re all just little girls, when they’re being fed all the bullshit about being entitled to happiness like it’s a birthright. That’s what you don’t understand—when to stop perpetrating the myths that ruin their lives. Innocence kills, Jen. Believe me, it kills. I see it every fucking day of my life.”
I suspect I may have smirked a little the first time I watched this domestic squabble, for the overheated exchange is rather close to the cop-opera parody of Chris Elliott’s chef d’oeuvre, Action Family. What has struck me in subsequent viewings, however, is the very real nervous energy that Woods trembles with, the eagerness with which he pounces for the phone as soon as his wife storms out of the bedroom, jumping at any opportunity for some action, any excuse to get out of the house. (On the line is the late Charles Durning, very good as Hopkins’ sometimes-partner Dutch.)
There is a “Dear John” waiting for Lloyd when he gets back to the office—exit wife and daughter—which frees him up to pursue his woman-killer, as well as to sport-fuck women tangentially involved in his police work. “Everyone knows you have a wild hair up your ass about murdered women” says Hopkins’s Born Again Captain—Raymond J. Barry in a self-contained twist on the hothead cliche—and though this is evidently true, for Hopkins does have a vigilantly protective attitude towards women, it is not at all clear that he likes them very much. It’s as though they’re forever letting him down with their penchant for getting butchered. (Those who know anything of Ellroy’s personal history know that Hopkins’s complex is also the author’s, referent to the central formative event of his life, his mother’s unsolved murder in 1958.)
A crime-scene clue—a misplaced book of feminist poetry called, I believe, The Angry Womb, whose authoress has the “Har har” surname Van Dyke—leads Hopkins to canvassing feminist bookstores for leads. Hopkins is met—better to say intercepted—at the door of one such store called Feminist Bibliophile by the proprietress, Kathleen McCarthy, played by Lesley Ann Warren, smoking seriously and standoffish in black.
The centerpiece of the movie, in terms of performance and densely layered characterization, begins right here. When Ms. McCarthy demurs and allows Sgt. Hopkins to come in, the man who was introduced negotiating the precinct floor like he could do it with his eyes closed, who has a practiced old-hand patter with escorts, is for the first time thrown off-balance, shy and awkward in this strange environment surrounded by what might as well be foreign-language literature. (A detail one only catches in 35mm—a copy of Liv Ullmann’s Changing on display in the background.) He is also clearly impressed by the forbidding front that McCarthy puts up—she’s the one woman strong and disillusioned enough to meet his standard. (“Why can’t they fucking fly like us?” Hopkins bemoans of the weaker sex earlier, a line that is exceedingly enjoyable to quote.)
Hopkins, then, seems genuinely surprised when McCarthy accepts his meek invitation for a cup of coffee. When he brings her to a department party as his date, he is gallant and courteous and eager to please. As their evening together carries on into dinner, and as Ms. McCarthy gives way to Kathleen, she relaxes enough to begin emotionally denuding herself, telling Hopkins the story of her life, including a traumatic incident in high school where she was raped by two boys in the bathroom and subsequently abandoned by her clique of would-be poetesses. Kathleen then gives way to the Kathy of those days, and as she exposes her hidden vulnerability, the no-longer-cowed Hopkins steeples his fingers, attempting to muster appropriately sympathetic reactions, to keep up his flagging interest by treating the date like a soft interrogation. Back at the Feminist Bibliophile, Kathleen mentions a secret admirer who has been sending her doggerel poetry and dried flowers for a decade or more, and a supercilious smirk sneaks into Hopkins’s expression. He grows bored and restless, picking lint from the sofa, only snapping back to attention when Kathleen’s eyes land on him, finally perking up again when it seems like he’s actually going to get laid. And when Kathleen excuses herself to take a pre-coital shower, he exhales a long pent-up, eye-rolling, beleaguered “Jeeeeeee-sus Christ!” Every beat, every reaction shot, every brazenly off-putting actorly decision here is worked through to a level one rarely encounters in the best screen drama, not to speak of genre movies.
“Is this a feminist movie?” a friend asked as I was chumming the waters of social media in hopes of getting asses in the seats for Cop. The short answer is “Errrm… ,” but I embellished this, stating that it was “better to say it takes place in the zone where hardline feminism and frothing misogyny overlap, like Fascism and Communism in the Schlesinger-Poole model.” Strange bedfellows—or perhaps not. The name of Warren’s character, Kathleen McCarthy, is, I believe, a nod to Catherine MacKinnon, the prosecutorial arm of militant feminist Andrea Dworkin’s anti-pornography crusade in the 1980’s, which linked arms with religious conservatives and Ronald Reagan’s Meese Commission. Thrillers, particularly those of Brian de Palma, were also popular targets, which is somewhat ironic, as these were the only mainstream movies actually willing to engage with the rhetoric of Take Back the Night—see for example Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact and Tightrope.
At the heart of Cop is a strange triangle indeed—between Sgt. Hopkins, Ms. McCarthy, and her fawning secret admirer, the poetaster who has been sending her flowers, not coincidentally, for just as long as Hopkins’ serial killer has been at work. In a neat piece of moral confusion, the villain of the piece is revealed as this sweet wallflower who, while carrying a torch for “Kathy” since high school, has been venting his repressed sexual aggression on other women. This leaves the gross and loutish Hopkins, who is at least honest about his venal appetites, to play the unlikely role of the white knight—chalk one up for the unsavory guys! (It’s also a time-tested piece of rhetorical self-justification by Ellroy, insisting that anyone who doesn’t wear their sleaziness on their sleeve must necessarily be a hypocrite.)
Talking of which, among this week’s essential reading is Tom McCormack’s dissection of the thinly-veiled nastiness of the “Nice Guys of OKCupid,” which concludes with a text, “Pop-Punk Pick-Up Line,” which was previously unknown to me:
This certainly works for the progenitors of the genre, The Descendants, who expressed precisely this sentiment in songs like “Hope,” while, in “Marriage,” frontman Milo Aukerman sang the words every woman longs to hear: “I don’t want to have sex with you/ I want to be your friend.” But I have loved pop-punk for my entire post-adolescent life, and if there is any single credo that I live by, it is never to revise any aesthetic opinions determined at the wise age of 15, so I will counterpoint the “Pick-Up Line” with J. Church, expressing a sentiment appropriate to the deeply cynical Cop: “You should’ve known that a sensitive guy lives a lie, you can’t look him in the eye.”
(R.I.P. Lance)
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.