Old Yorker

  • 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

  • ET: The Extra-Terrestrial

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (1982)

    In her rave review in 1982 Pauline Kael wrote that ET ‘seems to clear all the bad thoughts out of your head’.  If that’s going too far, it is fair to say that negative thoughts about Steven Spielberg disappear while you’re watching the film.  As I’d hoped they would:  not having seen it for decades, I decided to go back to ET partly because I found Spielberg’s latest, Disclosure Day, so dismaying.  You could say that not much has changed during the nearly half-century interval between them.  Both storylines set in opposition brainy, benign extra-terrestrials and aggressively mistrustful humans, more innocently receptive earthlings mediating between the two.  Yet the distance between ET and Disclosure Day, as examples of heartfelt sci-fi entertainment, is to be measured in light years.

    ET (like Disclosure Day) was Spielberg’s idea.  He outlined the idea to Melissa Mathison, who wrote the eventual screenplay.  In simple terms, the story is a variation on the imaginary friend theme.  When Spielberg’s parents’ marriage ended, just as he was entering adolescence, he invented an alien companion – a specifically male companion to compensate for the brother he’d never had and the father he felt he’d now lost.  (As anyone who’s seen The Fabelmans (2022) will be aware, Spielberg was the eldest of four children but the only boy.)  ET’s Elliott Taylor (Henry Thomas), the ten-year-old middle child of three in a suburban California family, has an elder brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton), and a younger sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore).  Their father is now in Mexico with another woman; their mother, Mary (Dee Wallace), is evidently distressed and struggling to keep things together, running the home single-handed as well as holding down a job.  One of a group of extra-terrestrials, visiting Earth at night to gather plant specimens, becomes separated from the others.  He’s left behind when – just before American government agents arrive on the scene to investigate evidence of the flying visit – the aliens return to their own planet.  The solitary, frightened, far-from-home creature shelters in a shed in the Taylors’ garden, and it’s Elliott who finds him there.

    The rest is cinema history, but it’s worth giving a flavour of ET’s seemingly supernatural abilities and stressing that, for as long as possible, he remains concealed from adult view:  these strands are linked.  The day after ET’s arrival, Elliott feigns illness to stay away from school, using his home-alone time to coax the alien from the shed into his bedroom, where he stays hidden for some time.  Elliott confides in Michael, who scoffs at first.  Gertie encounters ET next, Michael a while later.  The guest is a secret from the kids’ mother and, of course, from the authorities, for much longer.  ET shows telekinetic powers, levitating balls in Elliott’s room to describe the planetary arrangement he knows closer to home.  He instantly brings dead flowers back to life and heals Elliott’s cut finger.  The two strands are linked crucially in the idea that children believe in magic and adults don’t.  This is made maybe too obvious when Mary reads a bedtime story to Gertie – not only is this story Peter Pan, but the ‘clap your hands if you believe in fairies’ bit.

    Although Spielberg’s strong personal connection with the material may have helped, that obviously wasn’t sufficient to turn it into a good film.  At the same time, presenting childhood as an age of enchantment might have come across as pious and phony if Spielberg had been emotionally distant from the Elliott-ET story.  His achievement in ET is to fuse his crowd-pleasing story-telling skills with what feels like genuine empathy with childlike ways of thinking.  Some of the best bits in the film are pieces of daft, unforced humour that you don’t easily associate with Spielberg.  The casting of the children is inspired.  Henry Thomas is just wonderful as Elliott:  that’s all that needs to be said.  Drew Barrymore, only seven at the time, was a natural – she seems effortless, yet she already knows how to make the most of a look or a line.  In the difficult role of Michael, with one foot in childhood and the other in young adulthood, Robert MacNaughton is funny and touching.  Likeable as Dee Wallace is, she and the other adult actors, including Peter Coyote, as a thoughtful and even ambivalent US government agent, don’t stand a chance.  That seems right enough in the circumstances.

    For all the critical and commercial success that it enjoyed, ET became a notorious victim of the Academy’s preference for pictures with weighty, worthy themes over supposedly mere money-spinners.  Made for $10.5m, the film’s box-office receipts amounted to nearly $800m.  It won four Oscars but none of the big ones, most of which that year went to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.  (ET won Best Original Score, Visual Effects, Sound and Sound Effects Editing.)  It was characteristically decent of Attenborough to recall that ‘I was certain that not only would ET win, but that it should win.  It was inventive, powerful, wonderful.  I make more mundane movies’.  ET‘s big themes – around home and separation, loving and losing – coalesce satisfyingly and movingly.  Spielberg does an amazing job of telling a story chiefly through DP Allen Daviau’s visuals and the John Williams music.  The title character, designed by Carlo Rambaldi, from ET’s face to his fingertips, can fairly be described as iconic.  The bike ride up into a full-mooned sky is one of Hollywood’s most famous images.  Williams’ score is more than the perfect accompaniment to this – it seems to enable the elevation.  Elliott and ET are kindred spirits in different ways, ranging from the unaccountable to the shared letters that begin and end their names.  Gertie’s handclapping to revive Tinker Bell serves as a kind of anticipation of ET’s quasi-resurrection (and, when his alien companions return for him, ascension to the heavens).  Uneasy feelings about this are soon subdued, thanks to the finale’s emotional momentum.  The only thing I can’t forgive is the film’s helping make Halloween a far bigger deal on this side of the Atlantic than it was pre-ET.

    Childhood doesn’t last long; a big-league filmmaker’s age of innocence is liable to be transient, too.  In Spielberg’s case, this wasn’t a matter of upping the commercial ante.  After the colossal success of Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), he was under no immediate pressure – even before ET – to deliver another mega-hit.  In any case, he kept raking it in with the next two Indiana Jones movies (in 1984 and 1987).  But Spielberg also decided he needed to ‘grow up’ as a director.  By the mid-1980s, he was turning to screen adaptations of seriously admired novels – The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987) – and showing much less aptitude for this kind of cinema.  He has come up with good heavyweight dramas in his more than fifty years of filmmaking, notably Schindler’s List (1993), but they’re not what he deserves to be celebrated for.  In ET, he combines sentimental conviction, visual imagination and spinning-a-yarn flair to terrific effect.  He also trusts his audience, regardless of their age.  The film thoroughly deserves its lasting reputation as a popular classic.

    18 August 2026

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