Happy Anniversary -- kinda-sorta -- to me (and All the President's Men)

Sometimes an anniversary passes without your being fully aware of it, until you’re reminded of it by another milestone. Consider this: Last month was the 40th anniversary of the start of my first full-time newspaper job, as arts and entertainment editor of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss. (Alas, that also was the 40th anniversary of my departure from my beloved home town of New Orleans.) And one of the first movies I reviewed for the paper was All the President’s Men — which opened 40 years ago today in New York.

Even before I landed the Clarion-Ledger gig, however, I had already reviewed dozens, maybe hundreds of films for high school and college papers, and various small newspapers (as a free-lancer) in the New Orleans area — including, no joke, The Clarion Herald, a Catholic weekly paper that ran my reviews of Woodstock, The Thomas Crown Affair, Wild in the Streets, Yellow Submarine and several other films, beginning when I was a precocious high-schooler.

So, one way or another, I got to write about most of the major '70s movies (and quite a few '60s classics). Indeed, I still have a Clarion-Ledger tearsheet somewhere that has both my original review of Taxi Driver and my review of a Peter Fonda action movie titled Fighting Mad — whose young director, Jonathan Demme, I singled out for praise.

Now I'm old enough to cover many of those movies in film history courses I teach at University of Houston and Houston Community College. And the world keeps spinning in its greased grooves.

R.I.P.: Karen Black (1939-2013)

Karen Black was in the right movies at the right time to guarantee herself at least a footnote in film history.

Indeed, you could argue that Black – who lost her long battle with cancer Thursday at age 74 -- earned her iconic status as a screen queen of the New Hollywood era just on the basis of three roles: A skittish prostitute who takes a very bad acid trip (along with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) in a New Orleans cemetery in Easy Rider (1969); a coolly glamorous country music star who stokes the paranoia of an unstable rival (Renee Blakely) in Nashville (1975); and, most important, an emotionally clingy waitress who loves not wisely but too well when she falls for a classical pianist turned white-trash rowdy (Jack Nicholson) in Five Easy Pieces (1970).

But wait: There was more.

Black also brought captivating shadings of intelligence and vulnerability to stock-issue “girlfriend” roles opposite George Segal as a hairdresser turned junkie in Born to Win (a flawed but fascinating 1971 drama widely available in DVD editions that emphasize then-unknown co-star Robert DeNiro), and Kris Kristofferson (in his movie starring debut) as a down-on-his-luck musician exploited by a crooked narc (Gene Hackman) in 1972’s Cisco Pike.

And yes, I’ll admit it: As a hormonally inflamed teen-ager, I briefly but intensely nursed a crush on Black way back in the day after seeing her play a sweetly spirited young woman who proves to be Miss Right for a fellow library employee (Peter Kastner) too easily distracted by a crazy/sexy Miss Wrong (Elizabeth Hartman) in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), a pre-Graduate coming-of-age comedy that hardly anyone – not even its director, Francis Coppola – ever has nice things to say about anymore.

(How much did I – do I – love this flick? I still have an original vinyl LP of the soundtrack album – featuring “Darling, Be Home Soon,” the title tune and other songs by the Lovin’ Spoonful – and a Warner Archive DVD of the film itself.)

Black earned two Golden Globe awards as Best Supporting Actress during her ‘70s heyday, for Five Easy Pieces and the 1974 filmization of The Great Gatsby. (In the latter, she was perfectly cast as the doomed adulteress Myrtle Wilson.) And she made another bid for inclusion in the film history books by playing an ice-cold femme fatale in Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, the deftly seriocomic and criminally under-rated Family Plot (1976).

She also made a lasting impression – though probably not the kind she would have wanted – for her inadvertently campy turn as a frantic stewardess who must take control of a damaged airliner in Airport – 1975. Yep, you guessed it: This is the film that triggered the oft-quoted, much-parodied line: “The stewardess is flying the plane!”

Black remained active in movies and television long after the ‘70s, with credits ranging from neo-grindhouse horror movies (House of 1,000 Corpses) to quality series TV (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) to freewheeling indies (The Independent, in which came off as a very good sport while playing a spoofy version of herself).

She also appeared in The Trust, an excruciatingly maladroit 1993 low-budget drama about the life and death of philanthropist William Marsh Rice, founder of Rice University, which was filmed on location in Houston and Galveston. But to say anything more about that unfortunate career choice would be needlessly unkind.

Suffice it to say that Karen Black was a thoroughgoing professional. And like many other thoroughgoing professionals, she occasionally gave movies much more than they ever gave her. 

Independence Day musings

@JoeLeydon you bet, Joe
— Peter Henry Fonda (@iamfonda) July 5, 2013

Blast from the past: Peter Fonda talks about Ulee's Gold

When the cameras started rolling for this June 1997 interview, Peter Fonda and I still were talking about one of my all-time favorite movies -- The Hired Hand (1971), in which he co-starred opposite the late, great Warren Oates under his own direction. But he was there to promote Ulee's Gold -- for which he would earn a Best Actor nomnation -- and that's what we spent most of our time discussing. Which is cool, because that's a pretty damn good movie, too. I strongly suspect Fonda could actually win an Oscar if someoone took a chance and offered him one more meaty role. Hope it hapens.

First rave for 3:10 to Yuma

Todd McCarthy of Variety has weighed in with the first rave review for 3:10 to Yuma.

The verdict: "3:10 to Yuma is a tense, rugged redo of a film that was pretty good the first time around. Reinforced by a strong central premise, alert performances, a realistic view of the developing Old West and a satisfying dimensionality in its shadings of good and evil, James Mangold's remake walks a fine line in retaining many of the original's qualities while smartly shaking things up a bit." McCarthy waxes enthusiastic about the lead performances by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale -- and singles out for special praise "a wonderfully leathery characterization by Peter Fonda as a supremely tough old bounty hunter."

3:10 to Yuma opens Sept. 7 at theatres and drive-ins everywhere. You can read all about it in the October issue of Cowboys & Indians magazine, which hits newsstands Sept. 4 with a cover story by.... by.... well, by me, actually.

Trailer alert: '3:10 to Yuma'

If you're a Western fan, this should be very encouraging: An exciting trailer for 3:10 to Yuma, with Russell Crowe, Christian Bale and Peter Fonda riding hard and shooting straight for director James Mangold. Hey, I'm ready to saddle up and gallop over to the megaplex for this one.

Still easy riding

Nice interview with Peter Fonda by Susan Carpener in today's L.A. Times. But I wonder if the piece appeared today primarily because Fonda's the only person attached to Ghost Rider who's willing to talk with the mainstream media this close to the flick's opening day?