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The title evokes morbid purity in a curdled world, the credits promise Lichtenstein abstraction sustained to the end. The frayed Stars and Stripes overlooks a waterfront cut into red-white-and-blue swaths, cf. Godard's Made in U.S.A., the tour of the East River's boneyard is set to jaunty music. (Corpses with cement shoes share the bottom with illegal roulettes and cracked safes, "puffing up and rusting out.") A gangland war, cigar-chewing capo (Edmond O'Brien) versus giggling upstart (Bradford Dillman, anticipating Dean Stockwell's Lynch turns). Between them, the hitman (Richard Harris) has an air of lethal nonchalance but an appearance closer to Take the Money and Run than to Get Carter. "You know what you are? A pinball! I shoot you up the slot! You bounce when I shake the table! You light up when I play good!" Exaggerating every action trope with sadistic derision, John Frankenheimer goes for Looney Tunes and abuts on Seijun Suzuki. Hoodlums in Mugsy 'n' Rocky attire populate this caricature, where people get tossed into acid vats or down elevator shafts and meetings take place inside inflatable mazes shaped like Picasso fertility goddesses. The hero's squeeze (Ann Turkel) doubles as a teacher so that the obligatory vehicular chase can include a school bus, his archnemesis (Chuck Connors) has a metallic claw for a hand that bleeds oil. (Knife, floral bouquet and bondage lash are among his alternate appendages, a gag elaborated in Dante's Innerspace.) Gators in the sewer ("big as wrestlers"), bombs in the classroom. "It pays to keep clean," reads a sign during the climactic shootout at a linen factory, though the hero's arch koan ("A cigar don't care who smokes it") might be a better fit for the filmmaker's oblique confession as a hired pistolero. With Zooey Hall, Kathrine Baumann, Janice Heiden, and Constance Ford.
--- Fernando F. Croce |