(NOTE: THIS IS A REVISED POSTING OF THE REVIEW. DUE TO A TECHNICAL PROBLEM, THE ORIGINAL POSTING WAS INCOMPLETE)
JOHN PHILIP LAW: DIABOLIK ANGEL
By Carlos Aguilar & Anita Hass
Foreword by Ray Harryhausen
Scifiworld/Quatermass         240 pages Â
€35.00                                                            Â
Review by John Exshaw
Towards the end of John Phillip Law: Diabolik Angel, authors Carlos Aguilar and Anita Haas describe their book as “an unfinished workâ€, anticipating, as they did, further films in the strange career of an actor best remembered for playing the black-clad super-criminal in Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik (1968), the blind angel, Pygar, in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), and the turbaned hero of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973). Sadly, as it turned out, Diabolik Angel will stand instead as the last word on Law, who died of cancer at the age of 70 in May of last year, during the final stages of the book’s preparation.
Due, in part, to his association with such iconic, but necessarily two-dimensional, characters as Diabolik and Sinbad, Law himself remained something of a screen enigma, a somewhat remote, otherworldly presence whose own personality was seldom discernable in the roles he played. His best non-fantasy performances – as the naïve Russian submariner in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1965), the haunted protagonist of Death Rides a Horse (1967), the object of Rod Steiger’s affections in The Sergeant (1968), and the deadly but anachronistic knight of the air in Von Richthofen and Brown (1971, a.k.a. The Red Baron) – were sufficiently compelling and varied (though united by a certain innocence) to suggest that Law would become a leading character star of the 1970s. And yet somehow such status eluded him.
Reflecting on this, Law remarked, “A lot of people have told me that I had all the qualities to be a big star, one of the biggest of my generation. Like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, who are both the same age as me, and both started at the same time. But the point is that I never wanted to be a star, I wanted to be an actor, and that isn’t the same thing. Besides, there was always the problem of my height [6’5â€]: I was too tall to play somebody’s son, and too baby-faced to look like someone’s father. That’s why they almost always gave me roles of special characters, like comic book heroes, and historical figures.â€
Combined with that, as Aguilar and Haas make clear, Law “came across few projects that suited his peculiarities [and] without a doubt . . . made some bad and irreversible mistakes.†The latter included turning down the Jon Voight part in Midnight Cowboy (on his agent’s advice) and that of Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider (due to a schedule conflict). In addition to rejecting films which he should, in retrospect, have accepted, Law also displayed a spectacular talent for picking those best avoided, such as Otto Preminger’s late-period duds, Hurry Sundown (1967) and Skidoo (1968), the soporific The Hawaiians (1970), the conspicuously flaccid The Love Machine (1971), and that byword for self-indulgence and ill-discipline, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (also 1971), a title that would prove all too prophetic with respect to Law’s standing as a Hollywood star.
In 1969, the year he missed out on both Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, Law also suffered the indignity of being replaced in the cast of The Gypsy Moths, following a parachute accident in which he was injured, and a poor relationship with his co-stars: “The atmosphere was terrible. Burt Lancaster was the star... a very egotistical man, who didn’t help anybody while shooting. . . . He couldn’t stand me, I suppose it was because I was taller than him. I can’t think of any other reason. Then there was Gene Hackman, another difficult person who is always trying to steal the show. Good actor, but not a good person. And the director, John Frankenheimer was always drunk before noon. . . .†Aeronautical accidents were to feature again in Law’s career two years later, when, during the shooting of Roger Corman’s Von Richthofen and Brown, several stunt flyers were killed.
Re: your editorial of this morning, my warped sense of humor could not resist my creating this graphic and re-naming CNN on the overkill they continue to broadcast on the US Airways story. With all due respect, of course, to for the pilot and his crew, all of whom are heroes.Â
Paul JilbertÂ
(Jilbert is the writer, producer and director of the new docmentary about pop culture artist Robert McGinnis).
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CR responds: Perfect! And, yes, this is no reflection on a story of genuine heroism that had a wonderful ending. As I pointed out in my editorial, however, even the most uplifting story can be over-killed, especially if no new relevant information is being released and the same B roll footage of the incident continues to run endlessly. You can even see the anchors getting embarrassed and bored, as they are eager to talk about the vital political issues of the day. We're making progress, though, only about 50% of the air time on Campbell Brown's show was devoted to the airliner, though it appears ol' Larry ("One Note") King is dedicating his entire hour to the airline story for a second consecutive night -though Larry probably still thinks he's covering The Hindenburg disaster- Lee Pfeiffer
Like many news addicts, I keep the cable TV stations on during the day while I go about the more mundane aspects of running the Cinema Retro "empire". Yesterday's miraculous landing in the Hudson River of an airliner that suffered the loss of its engines after striking a flock of geese, was truly a head-turner. The networks, both local New York affiliates and national cable stations, appropriately reported on every second of the breathtaking event. The captain of the stricken craft had managed a truly spectacular water landing in the shadow of where the World Trade Center once loomed and, equally impressive, a Dunkirk-armada of disparate rescue boats managed to get all 150+ passengers evacuated from the plane within 90 seconds. The only thing that would have made it more riveting is if we found out Karen Black had been piloting the plane a la Airport '75. However, as the minutes turned to hours, the networks fell back on their reliably lazy and pandering methods of showing endless loops of the same footage, interviewing and re-interviewing the same passengers and aviation experts even as it became clear no remarkable or new information was forthcoming. As compelling as this story was, it was still mostly relevant to New Yorkers - after 9/11, the prospect of any airliner flying at an abnormally low altitude over the city would be of great concern. However, the incident occurred so quickly that there had been no panic or even speculation about what was happening. If you lived in Des Moines, Iowa and finally wanted to get some international news, you were out of luck. The networks were giving you wall-to-wall coverage of a story they decided was so compelling that the outside world would not exist. This is usually the same treatment afforded cases pertaining to missing sexy, white teenage girls.Â
Think I'm being too harsh? Well, I like a heart-warming story as much as anyone - and this one not only provided some real heroes but the all-too-infrequent happy ending because all of the passengers escaped without life-threatening injuries. However, at what point does coverage of a feel-good story become excessive and find the networks abdicating their responsibilities to report on what is happening elsewhere in the world? Consider just what else was occurring yesterday:
There was a contentious senate confirmation hearing for Eric Holder, who stands to become the most powerful law enforcement official in the United States.Want to know where he stands on the important issues and how he would run the department differently from the Bush administration? Well, if you didn't see the hearings when they were broadcast live in the morning, you were out of luck as far as cable news networks went.Â
Both Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden gave their farewell addresses to their colleagues before assuming their new positions as Secretary of State and Vice-President.
The battles in Gaza saw the worst day of violence so far and a UN building was shelled.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Fuggetaboutit! Journalists are risking their lives to cover these conflicts, but they seem to get as much airtime as the battle of Gettysburg.
Finally, President Bush gave his farewell address to the nation, though it was clear the networks only reluctantly afforded him 13 minutes of precious "non-news" coverage of the airliner crash. Depending upon where you stand on the President's performance, the speech was either moving and gracious or delusional and arrogant - but there was little air time afforded to discuss these issues or debate the significance of the speech, though MSNBC did allow its hosts to dwell on it a bit before resuming the "All Airliner, All the Time" coverage.
Late in the evening, and hours after the last relevant news had been released about the incident, I turned to the BBC to find out if there were any other human beings left on the planet who were making news. Alas, it did not appear so. How about Nightline for analysis of the Holder confirmation or Presidential speech? Nope - it was 100% airliner news - and included an entire segment on the bird menace to airliners. There were so many of these stories about feathered fiends that aired last night, I thought Hitchcock had risen from the grave to direct them.
This morning I turned out CNN in the vain hope the airliner story had been placed in proper context, but no such luck. In spot-checking the network, it's been hours and I haven't found a single story that wasn't related to the rescue. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Paddy Chayefsky's Network now seems like a documentary instead of a comedy. I guess the airline rescue story will be omnipresent on the news shows - at least until the next sexy, white teenage girl goes missing.