Rip Torn, with his smirking satyr grin, will probably never have a role that suits him better than Maury Dann, the country singer of Payday. Torn projects the magnetism of unstable personalities. He is so volatile and charged he really does have the pop charisma the role demands; you don’t necessarily think Torn is a good actor, but you don’t look away from the screen when he’s up there. He can do split-second seizures of rage and pain, and he can flip in an instant from his usual nakedly appraising look to a fiend-pixie smile that is so broad it’s hardly human. He is one of the few actors who are convincingly goaty; nobody else does rancidly unromantic sex scenes with the dippy arrogance — the near-madness — he brings to them. Always a little meaner and more self-sufficient than his roles seem to require, he is also freakishly, slyly funny. Torn has life to him, no matter what, and here his terrifying, sneaky smartness fits. Maury Dann has been touring in the Deep South for months, doing one-night stands. In the back of his Cadillac, between two girls, he’s a sweating rajah, drinking Coke and beer and bourbon, smoking pot and popping pills. In the thirty-six hours that the film spans, just about everything goes wrong for him, and, already tense and exhausted, he is wound up so tight he’s ready to explode.
The people who made Payday knew what they were doing. From the opening shots of a couple going in to a country-music concert through to Maury Dann’s ultimate explosion, the film lays open his scrambling, chiseling life. An exceptionally functional script, by the novelist Don Carpenter (the first he has had produced), makes it possible for the film to cover the grimy pop scene of a small-time recording “star” — the barnstorming life of deals and motels and restaurants, of groupies, quarrels, blackmailing disc jockeys, and payoffs. Maury, a third-rate Johnny Cash, travels in a two-car caravan with his entourage: his manager, McGinty (Michael C. Gwynne); his driver, cook, and “chief bottle washer,” the fat, loyal Chicago (Cliff Emmich); and his musicians and girls. They are rootless refugees from poverty, out of nowhere and rushing to a more affluent nowhere. A teen-age groupie with the slow smile of a Southern belle (Elayne Heilveil) works in a dime store and doesn’t know what an omelet is; all her life she’s eaten at counters and at McDonald’s — “maybe three thousand hamburgers,” she says. Being taken along by Maury is like being drawn into orbit. The people in the small towns idolize Maury, because he’s somebody; he may be the only kind of somebody they feel is theirs.
Payday was made by an independent company, with Ralph J. Gleason, the veteran writer on jazz, who is vice-president of Fantasy Records, as executive producer. Financed by Fantasy Records and completed last year, it was brought in for under seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Universal, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Columbia all turned it down for distribution — though it’s doubtful if they could bring in a film that looked this professional for three times that amount. To direct, Gleason and Carpenter picked Daryl Duke, who worked for the National Film Board of Canada before moving into Canadian and American television; he had not directed a theatrical feature before, but he knew the music scene. He’s maybe too professional a director — too businesslike and slick — but he never lets your attention falter. Payday was shot entirely on location in Alabama, and with a cast partly of professionals and partly of local people, who play the drifters and the small-town characters without any false notes that I could detect. Payday isn’t designed to be conventionally gripping or to have the usual melodramatic suspense; even halfway through, we’re not quite conscious of where it’s heading. Everything that happens is prepared for, yet in such an unforced way that we don’t feel shoved. The editing (by Richard Halsey) seems to carry us along on the undercurrents; when from time to time the plot surfaces, we receive small hair-trigger shocks.
We get to know Maury Dann in different relationships, and we see what he came out of. On the way to a date in Birmingham, he visits his wreck of a mother, who bore him at sixteen, and now, fifty-one and a pill head, looks eighty; he goes out on a quail shoot, has a fight about his hunting dog, stops in on his ex-wife but doesn’t stick around to see his three kids. After each contact with the past, his frustrations need release, and when his blond mistress (Ahna Capri, doing an Ann-Margret role, and very well) goads him at the wrong moment, he throws her out of the car. Carpenter’s writing is skillful; each person is given his due — no one is put down or treated condescendingly. Yet this very awareness, this intelligence that informs and controls every detail, shuts us out. The conception precludes Hollywood “heart,” as it precludes “poetry” — yet, perhaps irrationally, we want more than accuracy and slice-of-life understanding. We want an illumination, a sense of discovery — something.
Rip Torn seems perfect in the role, but there is a disadvantage to him: who could have empathy with Rip Torn? He’s always on his own malevolent wavelength. And the movie keeps its distance at all times; we observe what the characters feel, but we are never invited to feel with them. When we stay on the outside like this, there’s no mystery. We don’t sense other possibilities in the people; we never intuit what else they might have been, never feel anything larger in them than the life they’re caught in. It’s part of the picture’s realistic integrity to show them for what they are, without sentimentality; yet to view stunted lives is not altogether satisfactory — as I think Fat City also demonstrated. This picture is much tougher-minded, and it’s up-to-date — it has none of the blurring, softening (and antiquing) effect of a tragic tone. I don’t know how it would be possible to present this life as acridly and faithfully as Payday does and infuse into it the beauty of some redeeming illumination without falsifying and destroying it. But this realism is close to the realism of hardboiled fiction; the astuteness is self-protective, and it prevents Payday from rising above craft.
When you hear people in the pop-music business swapping stories, you may think that someone should make a movie and show how it really is, and that’s what these moviemakers have done. But to lay out what you know is a limited approach to realism. We grasp exactly what we are meant to think and feel about each detail of these dissolute, messy lives. And it frustrates the imagination when a world is so clearly defined — more clearly than is possible, I think, for an artist.
A clue to what’s missing may be found by making a comparison with, say, Francesco Rosi’s extraordinary 1965 film The Moment of Truth — socially a comparable story, dealing with a poor Spanish boy’s road out of rural poverty and his barnstorming life as a matador. It, too, is about poverty, dislocation, and corruption, and the movie’s method is also apparently objective and impersonal. The difference is that The Moment of Truth raises emotions that neither its moviemaking team nor we can fully comprehend, and so the material draws us in and stays with us. It does so, I think, because Rosi’s style expresses a larger vision of life than that of his characters — his art is in itself a cry of rage about what the poor are deprived of. The largeness of his vision is proof of the human possibilities that his hero, living in a circle of corruption, is cut off from. Payday doesn’t have an expressive style that says there’s something more than Maury Dann’s corruption. There’s no rage in the film, and no sensibility that goes beyond awareness, except in a few flashes. There are brief memorable moments: the blowsy blonde’s face when she wakes from a nap in the car to see her lover making out with the little groupie belle right next to her; the driver Chicago’s mixture of emotions when he hands the car keys over to Maury Dann before being hauled off by the police. And they’re memorable just because something larger and not easy to define is going on in them — because they transcend programmed realism. They have what a work of film art has in its approach — a sense of wonder.
In Payday we see only the crudiness of the pop scene; the music itself is largely neglected. But country music has links to the past, and if we could feel that there was love for this music in Maury Dann himself, and in his followers and audiences, the movie might have that transforming quality we miss. Because when a people’s folk art is corrupted — and they’re still trying to find some joy in it, since it’s still the only art that’s theirs — there is deprivation, all right, and rage isn’t far away. To show corruption as it is is the honest reporter’s way, and although it’s a great deal for a movie to do, it’s not enough. (It may even imply assent — though I don’t think that happens here.) To show corruption as it is and by your style to reveal why it shouldn’t be — that’s the honest artist-reporter’s way.
Jimmy Cliff, the reggae singer who stars in The Harder They Come — made in Jamaica, and the first feature made there that deals with Jamaican life — has radiance and the verve of an instinctive actor. The film itself is a mess, but the music is redeeming, and Jimmy Cliff’s joy in music, along with the whole culture’s, stays with you. (The title song goes on playing in your head.) The director, Perry Henzell (who was also the producer, and the co-author with Trevor D. Rhone), begins to tell a basic hero myth, like that of the poor Spanish boy who dreams of becoming a matador, or the poor American boy who dreams of becoming a prizefighter, or the early life of a Maury Dann. And as long as he stays within the bounds of this story — which is probably very close to that of Jimmy Cliff himself — the film is satisfying, because the Jamaican ferment and spontaneity are new to the screen, and how can we not be interested in the home ground of the people who keep that lilt even in the New York noise? In Jamaica, the rhythmic swing of the voices is hypnotic even without the reggae, which is a further development of the cadenced speech. Reggae — a mixture of calypso and rock and the blues — is the pop pulse of the country. The music seems organic; a church choir syncopating the hymns makes them as lush as the island itself.
The film has been shot in vivid, opaque color; you get an immediate impression of glow and warmth. And of the people’s passion for pop, which is maybe just another term for Americanization. The soft drinks and the billboards go right along with the transistor radios on the bicycles which pour out the reggae rhythms. A movie the hero, Ivan, goes to in Kingston — a spaghetti Western — is bastard pop, bloody and primitive, and more vital to the giggling, gleeful audience than the American Westerns it’s based on. There must be a natural affinity between pop and heat; it seems perfectly at home in beach cultures — part of the corruption and tourism. (Hawaii is pop.) In this Jamaican setting, the blatant immediacy of pop becomes a new form of exoticism. The early, best passages of the movie are crude but sensual, and almost magical in their effect on us.
As Ivan, Jimmy Cliff is such a thin-skinned, excitable innocent and his lyrics are so naïvely upbeat that it would be bad enough if his life turned into a smudged dream, and at the outset we expect that the movie will be a folk fairy tale set in decadence — a modern hero’s education in the rot of the record industry. (It would be instructive to know why Jimmy Cliff left Jamaica and now lives in London.) But Henzell tries to combine a singer’s life with the life of Jamaica’s first criminal hero — Rhygin, an actual outlaw of the fifties. Ivan makes a record, but the head of the record combine perceives that he’s a troublemaker, so the record isn’t pushed; rash and angry, Ivan gets involved in the drug trade, kills three policemen, and shoots a woman, and only then, because of his celebrity as a murderer, does his record become famous. The movie turns into a feverish social-protest fantasy, and infectious charm and social convulsions mix badly. (The Elia Kazan–Budd Schulberg film A Face in the Crowd, which tried to turn a pop idol into a Fascist political figure, ran into comparable problems of rabid inflation and hysteria.) The continuity is hurried and haphazard. By the time Ivan is writing slogans on walls, going from “I Was Here” to “I Am Everywhere,” he has turned into a symbol of revolt, and because of him the businessmen try to starve the people into submission. The episodes aren’t dramatically intact, and they’re not rounded off enough to explain the hero’s change from country boy to defiant, publicity-loving outlaw. The movie itself becomes an example of pop sensationalism when Ivan is on the Most Wanted posters and at the top of the hit-record charts. There are so many ironies and cross-currents in the culture that we can’t handle this ironic martyrdom, too. We’re left without help to account for the irony that is central: the people’s true and deep enjoyment of pop synthetic, which they transmute into folk art.
[February 24, 1973]