The red, white and blue avenger – ready to serve up Justice. Or hors d’oeuvres.

Shield us from this movie!

They tried to fix Captain America in 1990. And failed a third time.

During WWII, a young man named Steve Rogers is transformed into “Code Name: Captain America” through super soldier serum. Wearing a costume that looks suspiciously like my dominatrix’s bondage-rubber piss-suit, he battles a Nazi created with the same serum called the Red Skull, and is inadvertently frozen in Alaskan ice for 50 years, until he emerges in the ‘90s to battle the same Red Skull, grown suave and closer to world dominatrix—I mean, domination.

Captain America’s onscreen debut was in the 1944 serial CAPTAIN AMERICA, which sullied his heroic image by ignoring canon and casting a doughy guy in the titular role who had zero reason to be Captain America. Non-actor Reb Brown’s 1979 TV movie CAPTAIN AMERICA didn’t help. Now comes this third filmic iteration, the Marvel Entertainment Group re-launching the Captain with an origin closer to canon (yet still weirdly misshapen), some half-decent actors and a wide-ranging story, in a seemingly sincere feature film that nonetheless ends up so cheap and mediocre it went Direct-to-Video upon its release.

Three strikes. Doesn’t that mean you’re out in American baseball parlance?

Matt Salinger is the new face of Steve Rogers/aka Captain America (yet still weirdly misshapen), with striking seaside-vacation eyes over a flattened nose that looks like his bondage rubber is stretched way too tight and he can’t breathe. Call me racist, but a guy named Captain America should ideally have more of a Greek or aquiline nose, no? The son of enigmatic Catcher In The Rye author, J.D. Salinger, Matt comes to the legendary character with a powerful résumé that includes REVENGE OF THE NERDS and not much else.

Ronny Cox (DELIVERANCE) is President Kimball (who maintains “to this day, the finest script I have ever read . . . how those guys messed that film up, I will never know”). He is kidnapped by the Red Skull and threatened with sitting in a comfy chair, before escaping the Skull’s generic mobster guys with the help of Captain America and his presidential retinue of generic army guys.

Ned Beatty (who was teamed with Cox in DELIVERANCE) plays a reporter friend to the president. He must have figured: Well, SUPERMAN turned out well. Why the hell NOT do another superhero movie?!

Darren McGavin is the traitor American General, usually a staunch, raspy presence, but here phoning it in. Funniest part of his performance is – Will Robinson! Yes, Bill Mumy actually plays the Young General. People wonder why this guy who did such a good job as a child actor on LOST IN SPACE faded into obscurity. Watch this performance. See why.

Scott Paulin is Red Skull, a reasonable villain once he finds his feet as a modern Italian Mafioso—what?! Yes, Red Skull from canon ran the Nazi offshoot organization Hydra. Here, the writers place him in an Italian villa with Fabio-like bodyguards; beyond that, I didn’t pay attention. His first scenes feature his face still forming, like a melting gummy bear. As a boy, his character was kidnapped for his intelligence and injected with the super serum in Nazi Germany.

The German scientist who created the serum for the Nazis, Dr. Vaselli (Carla Cassola) is remorseful over the kidnapping, and defects to the U.S., to bequeath her knowledge to the American military. These early scenes are promising, as we see Germans speaking German with subtitles, good acting from all the principals, and heartfelt story elements, such as Steve Rogers’ dad being lost at war, Steve’s girlfriend (Kim Gillingham) vowing to wait for him, Steve himself stricken with polio and volunteering for the serum, U.S. generals remarking, “He may not be Superman, but he’ll be a living symbol of what this country stands for.” (Any licensing lawsuits from DC pending, boys, for blurting out a copyrighted character from their stable?…)

Ironically, when the movie’s namesake appears, it goes downhill. Director Albert Pyun (director of ALIEN FROM L.A., featured on MST3K – another great get for this film) has no concept on how to direct a superhero movie: action scenes are soporific, badly-staged and atrociously-directed, with enough cuts to kill a small bison. Pyun’s human interaction scenes are workable, but as soon as he is required to elevate the film to the super level, he falls victim to the Peter Principle (i.e. rising to the level of his IN-competence).

The music (by Barry Goldberg) is touching at first, with the slow love themes, but retains a vaudeville jaunt and becomes ludicrous during the action scenes. Eventually, the soundtrack becomes distracting for not reflecting the onscreen action at all.

To become the Captain, Steve is put in a chair and basically electrocuted with Movie Sparks flying outa the machines. It worked for Frankenstein. [see SIDEBAR.]

Steve’s first mission as Captain America is to stop a rocket from reaching the White House, launched by the Red Skull. His new costume is rationalized as “that crazy fireproof uniform that Dr. Vaselli made up for you” (– shyeh royt! You mean golden-shower-proof uniform. But it makes sense: it was designed by a German, and Germans are renowned for their scheisse videos). Apparently, Dr. Vaselli also made Cap’s iconic shield, the physics of which are laughable – flying in unnatural arcs, basic chroma-key shots showing it boomeranging in mid-air, hitting people softly, coming back into his hand in eye-straining choppy edits; with its plastic consistency making it as formidable as a Frisbee.

Red Skull beats Cap decisively in their first meeting, through the cunning use of edit-fu. He straps Cap to the rocket and starts the countdown. Cap grabs Skull’s hand, so that he can drag him along. In desperation, Skull pulls out a big knife – and lops off his OWN hand—what the–?!! Did you even TRY to cut off Cap’s hand that was holding you? And the stupid thing is: I thought this one-handed plot point would come back to serve a purpose in the denouement. I guess *I* was the stupid one…

Cap manages to deflect the rocket, in special effects that resemble those cardboard cutout stories you made in grade school. The rocket buries itself in Alaska, with Cap stuck to it, presumably perfectly frozen in 1943. Calendar dates fly by until Cap is unearthed by an expedition in 1993, defrosts, and runs off into the snow. He Meets Cute Ned Beatty and finds himself in the world of the future – and you can bet they throw every fish-out-of-water/man-out-of-time gag in the book at him.

CAPTAIN AMERICA does admittedly have a few “moments” – with Salinger trying hard to seriously bring the Captain to life. Alas, the incompetence of the movie-makers around him leeched the poignancy and passion from his performance, leaving him looking like a dreamy-eyed blond dude with a flat nose and a Frisbee.

While hot German assassins track him (led by the perfect Francesca Neri), Cap tracks down his old girlfriend from the ‘40s. Gillingham in old-woman makeup looks like Gillingham in old-woman makeup. But she does a good job also playing her own daughter, Sharon. The film conveniently kills off old Gillingham, so that Cap can Run From Danger with Sharon (the most sensual type of dating) and thereby hook up with her later. (Dude, have you no shame? This is your girlfriend’s daughter! …Oh well, a man’s gotta have it. A plot point so compelling it was used 24 years later in CAPTAIN AMERICA: WINTER SOLDIER!)

Sharon helps Cap track down Red Skull, and soon serves her purpose as Damsel in Distress, under the gun of Perfect Francesca. The final face-off between Cap and Skull is also ludicrous, not only because Pyun can’t direct action, but because Skull is using aikido while Cap is still trying to connect a Sweet American Right Hook. He loses the fistfight again (some kinda hero); how he remains standing after these bitch-beatings is anyone’s guess.

Oh, that’s right, I forgot: he’s wearing his bondage and discipline suit, so he’s loving every piss-drinking minute of it…

END

The Kid Flies Solo!

In his first movie without Dean Martin, THE DELICATE DELINQUENT, Jerry Lewis is a youth mistaken for a gang member, taken under the wing of a mentor cop… Time for the public to find out whether The Kid was all he was cracked up to be, or merely one half of a defunct team that needed the chemistry of both teammates to work.

Final verdict: a bit of both.

Before Jerry found his auteur feet (with THE BELLBOY, THE LADIES MAN, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR), this movie was like a “soft landing” for him, as he is still very much part of a duo, only his straight man is more of a square. Matter of fact, the mentor cop character was written for Dean Martin, and DELICATE DELINQUENT was meant to be the next Martin and Lewis picture, but Dean was livid about being asked to don a cop’s uniform! And thus, when Jerry went ahead and completed this movie – with Darren McGavin in the cop role – the split with Dean was final.

Written and directed by Don McGuire (co-writer ARTISTS AND MODELS), the story is premised on a misunderstanding that doesn’t make any sense, even within its own universe. Beat policeman Mike Damon (McGavin) is looking to reform one of the many street kids in a local gang, and pulls Sidney Pythias from a lineup (Jerry, 30 years old, playing 17). But Pythias is not a delinquent – he’s a janitor, and only acquainted with gang members (led by Robert Ivers) because there are no other “friends” to be had in this neighborhood. How he landed in the police lineup is conveyed in an opening sequence which is powerful yet stupid: When two gangs face off in an alley, klutzy Pythias bursts through a doorway spilling garbage, making them scatter; one of them drops his knife, Pythias picks it up, as police surround them; busted with a weapon with nowhere to run, Pythias is herded into the back of a police truck with the gang. (It doesn’t say much for the intelligence of police if they can’t discern weeping pansy Pythias is not part of this gang.)

The sergeant knows that by asking every lineup to drop trou, the department will discover that he is in the closet one of these days… but today is not that day.

When Jerry bursts through the doorway, he looks like he did in the early days of Martin and Lewis; the black and white filmstock adds to that illusion, though he’s also lost weight since his last film (HOLLYWOOD OR BUST), and he’s playing more energetic again. DELINQUENT was shot from September to October 1956, which means Jerry threw himself into the project as soon as he parted ways with Dean in June of that year (while PARDNERS was just being released and before the last Martin and Lewis film, HOLLYWOOD OR BUST, was released in December ’56!). It makes sense, as the movie was already slated for production with Dean, so the cogs were already turning and Jerry was swept along in the process. (What was surprising is that – they – just – kept – coming. In quick succession, Jerry would turn out comedy after comedy – THE SAD SACK, ROCK-A-BYE BABY, THE GEISHA BOY – with the same regularity as the Martin and Lewis catalogue, until he started writing and directing them as well, and the rest, as they say in France…)

According to the doc, JERRY LEWIS: THE LAST AMERICAN CLOWN, after Jerry split with Dean, his waning confidence was restored when he was asked to take the stage as a favor to Judy Garland, down with pneumonia. His impromptu solo killing is corroborated in Shaun Levy’s The King Of Comedy: The Life And Art Of Jerry Lewis. After that, there was no stopping The Kid.

Still, I would have loved seeing Dean in this film. Damon and Pythias have face-offs that are very emotional; the cop role empathetic, the janitor role pathos. It would have propelled Dean and Jerry into territory they’d never explored before; a great maturation point in their filmic careers. If only….

Thus, with Damon choosing Pythias (yes, the reference to the Greek legend is cited), no REAL delinquent is getting a chance at redemption. (I mean, look up “delinquent” – lawless, criminal, wrongdoer, malefactor – Pythias is NONE of these!) And though it’s written as if Pythias is “redeemed” from the street, there is actually NO REDEEMING ARC. Pythias goes from being a good kid – to being an inept cop. Inept because he is shown klutzing his way through the police academy (because, of course – comedy), and then – surprisingly – passing to the final stage, which is an armed ride-along with Damon, where he proceeds to get bitchbeaten by thugs in a fistfight, whereupon he loses his gun to a thug, who shoots someone with it. What does this say about the judgment of the police to let someone who only barely passes their tests onto the street?

The shooting incident leads to an official inquiry, where Pythias is in danger of being washed out of police academy, and Damon is shown lobbying for Pythias (in what could be considered the closest metaphor for the trust between the Greek legends of the same name). But what does this say about the ethics of the police force? That because you’ve staked your name on reforming a “delinquent,” even if he fails, you should ram him through to save face?

I guess Damon is a Republican.

The movie opens very hip, very “beat”; the jazz of bongos over trumpets, as street thugs face off in a wet alley; appealing to the rebel kids of that generation. Then it ends on an embarrassing sour squark as the message hits loud and unclear: Join The Police Force – Any Idiot Can.

Damon’s love interest is perfect-featured, smokin’ blond Martha (Martha Hyer), an out-of-touch council worker with a severe pointy bra, sent to reform kids with regulations and discipline, instead of empathizing with them or actually providing jobs or youth resources. At least we missed out on a coupla unnecessary Dino songs that he would have no doubt crooned at her.

Funny to see Frank Gorshin as a street “kid” harassing Martha; all we see is the 30-year-old Riddler who would harass Batman. A dame with a bra the size of an elephant (though still very pointy) walks by him, and he sniggers something to a friend, and I swear that times have changed so much, I don’t even know what to make of his comment – whether it’s sexist, funny, or dirty (or all three)!

Surprisingly, Jerry performs the single song in the movie and, for the first time onscreen, uses his natural voice! By Myself is NOT related to the 1980 Peter Criss song of the same name, but done for the exact same reasons! (Criss did it on his first solo album apart from KISS, Jerry does it in his first solo film apart from the guy who looked like Paul Stanley.) He’s not being funny or cute, but introspective. His voice deep, tragic and soulful, he finds his way closer to the Chaplin tragicomedies that inspired him. And when speaking during serious sequences, we’ve never heard Jerry’s voice this unaffected before. His love interest is a young female neighbor (Mary Webster), whom he doesn’t want to ask on a date until he’s a success: “I’m a nothing, and that’s the worst kind of something there is.” Pretty heavy for a Jerry Lewis movie. Her tiny pointy bra agrees.

Jerry would be the producer on DELICATE DELINQUENT (because Hal Wallis, his longtime Martin and Lewis producer had had enough of Jerry’s insubordination); he would star in it, and be an uncredited screenwriter. As with all Jerry’s movies, there are gag sequences that have nothing to do with the throughline, yet add an overall Jerry Lewis-ness to the proceedings: the theremin gag, the sergeant who can’t pronounce Pythias (a hypocritical ass who expects applicants to remember long series of numbers while he can’t even pronounce their name!), the professor making a spaceship for frogs, the Murphy bed, the Japanese wrestler, etc.

Wearing so many hats, one could realistically place the success or failure of THE DELICATE DELINQUENT squarely on Jerry’s shoulders. It cost $487,000 to make, and it grossed $6 million. The Kid was flying high.

END

The Ham With The Golden Charm.

Frank Sinatra an addict? So what’s new? Maybe the real life Sinatra wasn’t on heroin, as depicted in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, but he had his addictive vices. We all know them: booze, broads, bands. But then, everyone commits themselves to something. If you’re going to call commitment or heady enjoyment an addiction, well then everyone’s an addict. And if everyone’s an addict, then no one is an addict. It’s all just part of this condition called Life, innit?

From a novel by Nelson Algren, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM finds Frank playing ex-junkie Frankie Machine, just released from jail for “dealing,” trying to assimilate back into regular life. Trouble is: he came back to the same town he left. He’s not starting a new life, just returning to the old. Alcoholics Anonymous has a schmancy word for anything that reminds an addict of the desire to lapse back into their addiction: trigger. Well, this whole town is a trigger for Frankie: his crippled wife Zosch (ragged Eleanor Parker) won’t stop shriking, his ex-girlfriend (sultry Kim Novak) won’t stop being hot, his lowlife “business associates” won’t stop bugging him to deal cards, and his pusher (Darren McGavin) won’t stop living just across the street!

Understand that Frankie didn’t do time for illegal drugs – everyone calls him “Dealer” because of his “golden arm” at dealing poker games. In 1955, it was risqué to broach heroin addiction onscreen, so the filmmakers had to dodge and weave around the story and its theme of relapse. By the way, Frankie’s actual dealer is called Pusher.

Filmed entirely on a studio set dressed to look like a town square, director Otto Preminger intentionally made everything across the street from everything else – Frankie’s apartment, the pub, the club, the Pusher – to denote the claustrophobia, the entrapment of addiction… Or maybe it was just cheaper than a location shoot.

In its early stages the Elmer Bernstein soundtrack threatens to bludgeon us unconscious, and I don’t know whether it calms down in the latter stages or that we’re just inured to it.

More than anyone, Zosch pushes Dealer to Pusher again. He’s trying to hold it together and pretend to love her wheelchaired sweat pimples, in their apartment with the walls the color of dripping grease, and the radio tuned to the All Be-Bop channel, but she won’t stop talking smack, which drives him to smack.

Frankie aspires to be a drummer in a big band (that rehearse just across the street – what are the odds?!), but his relapse would ensure he fails the audition.

Performances are robust, except for a few “theatrical” flourishes from Parker and Novak. And weasely Sparrow (Arnold Stang) has been watching too much vaudeville. However, this was the transition era between theatrical and Method (matter of fact, the Eddie Van Halen of Method, Brando, was also up for Sinatra’s role), so we give these transgressions a pass.

The film doesn’t go deep enough to actually portray all the unsavory traits of an addict (again, probably due to censors, but also for the marketing angle of not making its star look bad), and Frankie comes off looking like a decent guy by the end. By the time Zosch resorts to extreme measures to hold her man, the film peters out with Frankie’s newfound sobriety portrayed as if it is eternal, rather than an ongoing struggle. Coincidentally, in 1954, that offshoot to Alcoholics Anonymous – Narcotics Anonymous (NA) – had only just been excised from its AA parent and given free reign to fool some of the people all of the time with their phony baloney gravitas. Either because the institution was so new, or because the filmmakers didn’t subscribe to the methods, thankfully, this story treads nowhere near NA.

Sinatra once again proves he is more than just a crooner, and would earn a Best Actor Oscar nom for this steely performance. His cold turkey scene is a disturbing unbroken take, as he climbs the dripping grease walls of madness. In Jerry’s Lewis’s 2005 book, Dean and Me, Lewis relates how he and Dean were actually on set watching this performance, and how director Preminger then asked Frank for another take. Frank flatly refused, opining he got it right the first time, and left the set. Lewis goes on to say that when he saw the scene in the final film, it was as powerful as Frank knew it to be.

Psychiatrists will add that maybe Sinatra was also addicted to power, fame, adulation. After the above anecdote, is there any response to this alarmist claptrap other than:

So what’s new?

END

For Moron Eyes Only.

Billy Madison is the type of mungo film experience that leaves one speechless on how a film of this lowbrow nature could ever have been greenlit. The answer, of course, is because that champion of dullards was involved – Adam Sandler, playing the eponymous Billy Madison with every ounce of talent the christian god forgot to give him. A fine businessman he is; a writer and comedian he’s not.

Acting Students: Note how Mr. Sandler poignantly imbues this scene with a fascinating spectrum of emotion.

In order to inherit his father’s hotel empire, twenty-something idiot-boy, Billy Madison must promise his father (Darren McGavin) that he’ll repeat grades 1 through 12 in six months and graduate, or the empire will fall to a business acquaintance (Bradley Whitford).

We discover Billy can’t even spell “rock.” How then are we expected to believe this imbecile who fills his days with “daiquiris, stroke mags and Nintendo” can accomplish his task in six months?

About now the speechlessness starts. This is not an underprivileged person deprived of getting the breaks and so therefore failing at life – Billy is an enabled douchebag whose father paid off teachers to pass him and who refused to educate himself, until his inheritance was at stake, at which point he suddenly wants to turn over a new leaf only to inherit the riches.

This is not a likeable guy. He is neither hero nor anti-hero. He is a waste of space. And the directionless movie can’t even make up its mind on how to portray him, because even though it disparages higher learning at every turn, the disparagement is in direct opposition to the plot of the movie itself, where Billy needs to graduate, i.e. display that he has learned, in order to claim his inheritance.

And the smokin’ blond first grade teacher (Bridgette Wilson) – instead of considering him the illiterate moron he is for trying to pass first grade – falls for him. Well, we all know she’s attracted to a multi-billionaire’s son for his great personality, right?

Directed half-heartedly by Tamra Davis, from an unfunny script by Tim Herlihy and Sandler (Herlihy would go on to write all Sandler’s “comedies” until 2002), Billy moves up through the grades via a montage, not actually doing tests or learning anything, but through attending camp, playing basketball, writing derogatory notes about the ugliness of his fourth grade teacher and having lice exams.

Is it even worthwhile wasting my server space on this review, or you frying your braincells reading it, or Adam Sandler pretending to act in it?

The answer is no.

END