Monthly Archives: August 2026

  • Smart Alec

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Guillermin (1951)

    The interest here consists of extraneous or incidental details – chiefly what became of some of those involved in this black-and-white British film.  Adapted by Alec Coppel from his own stage play, Smart Alec, though presumably set in the early 1950s, takes place inside and just outside a 1930s (Art Deco) block of flats in London.  An early overhead shot shows a large man sunbathing on a small balcony of an upper-storey flat; when the director, John Guillermin, eventually made it big in Hollywood, he would be a specialist in skyscraper spectacle (The Towering Inferno (1974), King Kong (1976)).  It’s nice recognising a few cast names in the opening credits – like Leslie Dwyer, memorable as the hard-drinking, children-loathing Punch and Judy man in the hit TV sitcom Hi-di-Hi! decades later.  The main character in Guillermin’s film really is an Alec, as well as a too-clever-by-half sort.  Alec Albion means to kill his rich uncle and inherit his fortune.  Alec’s cunning plan involves putting music on a record player, to distract attention and drown out the sound of the murder being committed.  The music is the ‘Colonel Bogey March’ – striking to hear this as a key soundtrack contributor well before David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).

    Agreeable music also comes in the film’s opening and closing sequences, from an organ-grinder (with a monkey) outside the flats.  Otherwise, Smart Alec is hard work, even though it’s of barely feature length (58 minutes) – you can only hope it was more fun to make than it is to watch.  A major problem is Alec (Peter Reynolds), who seems meant to be charming cad as much as homicidal villain.  Whereas Leslie Dwyer is enjoyable as Gossage, the porter in the block of flats, Peter Reynolds (I didn’t know the name or the face) is tiresome from the word go.  What’s more, you soon realise that it will be Dwyer’s heightened but essentially truthful playing, rather than Reynolds’ coarse acting, that’s anomalous in Smart Alec:  Charles Hawtrey, Edward Lexy and Kynaston Reeves are among those in the supporting cast to follow Reynolds’ lead.  To be fair to them, though, frenetic broad comedy is increasingly the order of the day – and its insistency upstages the central howdunnit of Smart Alec.  Even when all is explained, and Alec Albion finally thwarted and brought to justice, it remains a mystery why he had to marry his secretary (Mercy Haystead) to rope her in as an unwitting assistant to his dastardly deed.

    27 August 2026

  • Payday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daryl Duke (1973)

    Although he worked mostly in television and made only four cinema films, Daryl Duke received critical attention and praise for his sophomore feature The Silent Partner (1978), particularly in his native Canada, and before that, for Payday.  This story of the last day or two in the life of a country and western singer, Maury Dann, is very different from the various better-known C&W-themed films made over the course of the next decade or so.  Robert Altman’s sweeping, satirical Nashville (1975), deservedly the most famous of them, uses country music to reflect the state of the nation on the eve of the American bicentennial.  Michael Apted’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and Karel Reisz’s Sweet Dreams (1985) are straightforward biopics of country music legends, Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline respectively.  Payday might seem to have more in common with Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies (1983), whose protagonist, like Maury Dann, is a fictional character with a failed marriage and a substance dependency.  In fact, the two pictures are chalk and cheese because Tender Mercies, written by Horton Foote, is a redemption story.  It’s soon clear in Payday, written by Don Carpenter, that things won’t turn out well.

    Daryl Duke’s film is closer in acrid spirit to bleak, downbeat dramas of American cinema’s 1960s-hangover era like Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (also 1973).  Each of those movies is enlivened by its leading man – Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail, Al Pacino (to a lesser extent) in The Panic in Needle Park.  Rip Torn does the same for Payday, but his portrait of Maury Dann is bound to be frustrating because the storyline offers so little scope for developing the character.  In the opening scene, Maury and his band are playing in a small club.  He sings ‘She’s Only a Country Girl’, with a keen eye on the audience and, when he sees something there that he likes, a lewd grin.  Almost as soon as Maury is off stage, he seduces a young girl, Sandy (Linda Spatz), though his entourage already includes a mistress, whingy Mayleen (Ahna Capri).  Later, after he’s hooked up with teenage groupie Rosamond (Elayne Heilveil), Maury – as usual with plenty of booze and pills inside him – sprawls sweating between her and Mayleen in the back of his chauffeured Cadillac.  When Mayleen complains once too often, Maury tells his driver, Chicago (Cliff Emmich), to pull over, then orders Mayleen out of the car.  Her last appearance in the film is standing on the highway as the Cadillac drives away.

    That reference to a ‘chauffeured Cadillac’ may be misleading because Maury Dann is a lower-division C&W celebrity.  His manager, Clarence McGinty (Michael C Gwynne), encourages him to head straight for Nashville for a possible Grand Ole Opry slot, perhaps even in a show headlined by Johnny Cash, but Maury insists on sticking to his local schedule.  There are a few good scenes, as when Maury calls in at a radio station, where he bribes the oily DJ (Earle Trigg) with a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon to keep playing his records.  Or Maury, after a brief, bad-tempered visit to his ex-wife (Eleanor Fell), singing to himself a song with the refrain ‘the slowly fading circle on her finger where my ring used to be’ – an effective reminder of country music’s knack for transmuting marital bitterness into nostalgic sentiment.  (‘Slowly Fadin’ Circle’, like the opening ‘She’s Only a Country Girl’, was written by Shel Silverstein.)  There’s not a lot of music in Payday, though, given the milieu – all the more disappointing because Rip Torn sings well.

    You could say the film’s geography is its most successfully realised character.  Shot in Alabama, Payday is a true road movie in that the roads are a persistently strong presence.  Daryl Duke plausibly conveys the underside of C&W touring life as Maury Dann and his retinue travel round the Deep South.  (It’s testimony to Rip Torn’s talents that he fits into the quasi-documentary texture so easily – more easily than most of the less experienced, less supple supporting cast.)  But not enough happens in the narrative, and when something big does happen, it’s unconvincing.  Bridgeway (Walter Bamberg), Sandy’s boyfriend and boss, turns up drunk at a restaurant to accuse Maury of raping the girl, and pulls a knife on him; Maury quickly gets the upper hand and stabs Bridgeway fatally, before instructing McGinty to sort things out.  That means arranging for Chicago to take the rap:  the killing’s aftermath serves merely to illustrate Maury’s outrageous self-centredness.  He quickly gets a new driver – a fan-cum-aspiring-country-singer called Ted (Henry O Arnold) – but Maury is at the wheel of the Cadillac when, in Payday’s closing scene, he dies suddenly, of natural causes.  This seems to happen just so that the film can end.  The camera pulls up and away over the roadscape.

    26 August 2026

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