The Beatnik Spy

Archive for Patrick Baird

Flight of the Phoenix

May 23, 2013 Men's Adventure Movies, Men's Adventure Reading No comments

Taking your son to a testosterone enriched classic Men’s Adventure movie is an important obligation for any good father. My Dad took me to see “The Dirty Dozen.” I took my son to see “Goldfinger.”

If there was a short list of movies perfect for Father/Son sharing, “Flight of the Phoenix (1965)” would be on it. It’s a perfect Men’s Adventure movie, featuring three manly themes: perseverance in the face of adversity, struggling for moral leadership, and fixing shit.

After recently re-watching the movie for the umpteenth time on Turner Classic Movies, I sought out the original novel the film was based on, by Elleston Trevor. It’s a terrific read, taut and lean. The movie is pretty faithful to the book, which tells the story of a cargo plane carrying oil riggers and spare parts across the Libyan desert which crashes in the midst of a fierce sandstorm. Driven hundreds of miles off course, far from any civilization or oasis with no hope of rescue, the survivors are convinced by another passenger, an aircraft designer, to build a new plane from the wreckage and fly back to safety. Along the way, some go mad, others are killed by bandits, and the group nearly falls apart due to internal conflict.

The movie is gifted with an awesome all-male cast, headed by a grizzled Jimmy Stewart as the pilot and Sir Richard Attenborough as the navigator. Along for the ride are some of the greatest character actors ever: George Kennedy, Dan Duryea, Ernest Borgnine, Peter Finch, and Ian Bannen, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role. One change from the novel is to make the twitchy aircraft engineer a German, brilliantly portrayed by Hardy Kruger.

In the wake of his recent passing, I’d like to put in a few kind words for Ernest Borgnine. How many great Men’s Adventure movies did he elevate by his presence? “The Dirty Dozen,”"The Wild Bunch,”"Ice Station Zebra,”"The Vikings,” etc. For me, he will always be Lt. Commander Quinton McHale, an important figure that factored into my personal decision to join the Navy. True to his example, I did eventually wind up serving in “McHale’s Navy,” as one exasperated petty officer shouted at me when he found out I was a minesweeper sailor. (My haircut and uniform were not up to Navy standards, which led me to be handcuffed to a chair in the shore patrol office in Alameda. Long story.)

They remade “Flight of the Phoenix” in 2005 starring Dennis Quaid, adding a woman to the cast, which proves that the 21st Century sucks. That movie certainly did.

Read the book and sit down with your son to share a handful of classic Men’s Adventure DVDs some night.

Men’s Adventure on Goodreads

May 17, 2013 Men's Adventure Reading No comments

I recently discovered Goodreads (www.goodreads.com) and I think it’s a terrific site for both writers and readers. There are tons of discussions centered around books and authors, for nearly every reading interest.

Now, thanks to yours truly, there is a discussion group specifically devoted to Men’s Adventure.

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/103026-men-s-adventure

The group aims to celebrate classic works of men’s adventure fiction, but also to support writers of contemporary men’s adventure fiction. We’re looking to stimulate sharing and discussing writers and works of Men’s Adventure and perhaps to even define: “What is Men’s Adventure?”

Join the discussion!

Lord Jim

April 27, 2013 Men's Adventure Reading No comments

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, is a classic novel of men’s adventure, a deep and moving examination of the nature of moral character and courage.

Jim is the first mate of the Patna, a dilapidated steamer transporting pilgrims to Mecca. The ship strikes an underwater obstruction in the middle of the night, and fearing that the ship is about to sink, the crew panics and abandons the passengers to their fate. Jim at first resists this cowardly act, but somehow finds himself in the lifeboat with the Captain and other white crewmen. When they are rescued, they find that the Patna never sank, the pilgrims all survived, and they all face charges back in port.

More than once, characters express their sorrow at Jim’s failure. A bright, promising young man – “He was one of us” they bemoan.

After losing his sailing papers, Jim drifts throughout the South Pacific, from one menial seaport job to another. At each stop, he is recognized and he is driven further away from civilization by shame. Along the way, he engages the sympathies of a ship captain named Marlow, who does his best to aid him.

Marlow arranges for Jim to take on the administration of a remote trading post in the Malaysian kingdom of Patusan. Here, cut off from western civilization and his past, Jim triumphs and rises to earn the title of Tuan Jim or “Lord” Jim. Just as it looks as though he will redeem himself, Jim stumbles, however, and the book ends on a tragic note.

Lord Jim is highly regarding by critics, due to its sophisticated storytelling. Jim’s tale unfolds primarily from the viewpoint of Marlow, and the reader is left to piece together the central mystery of Jim’s soul through scattered anecdotes, conversations, and letters. Conrad is regarded a master prose stylist; there are certainly moments of beauty and arresting description in Lord Jim, but I think he occasionally goes on a bit. There are passages where three pages of text could easily have been boiled down to one, which makes Lord Jim (and much of Conrad’s work) a challenge for modern readers.

However, I do think it is well worth the effort. Lord Jim is a superb study of the notions of honor and courage and how difficult it is to live up to the expectations of a hypocritical society.

Lord Jim was adapted to film in 1965, starring Peter O’Toole as Jim. It’s passable entertainment, but it largely fails to match the original as a work of psychological depth.

Did George Lucas Kill John Carter?

April 4, 2013 Men's Adventure Movies One comment

I’ve just finished reading Michael D. Sellers’ book “John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood – the absolutely absorbing story of how the movie adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic sci-fi adventure “A Princess of Mars” was turned into an alleged box-office bomb by the suits at Disney.

I really enjoyed John Carter; I thought it was a terrific and relatively faithful adaptation of the Barsoom adventures. The movie delivered everything I wanted in an ERB adaptation: rousing manly adventure, a fully realized alien world, and an old-fashioned sensibility that was in step with the master himself. Andrew Stanton, the director and the man most responsible for bringing Barsoom to the screen, did his job admirably.

As Sellers details, a series of corporate leadership changes, neglect, and incompetent marketing left John Carter adrift in the marketplace, making its crash inevitable, in spite of the qualities of the film itself. The book also highlights a critical component in the mess that made the launch of John Carter a failure: the concurrent negotiations between George Lucas and Disney that led to the mouse factory’s acquisition of the mega-bucks film franchise.

If John Carter had succeeded and spawned sequels, conceivably it could have competed directly with new Star Wars movies distributed by Disney. Sellers doesn’t try to make the point that Disney deliberately tanked John Carter to land Star Wars but only the head honchos of the studio really know why they seriously neglected a good film. And I’m not saying that George Lucas himself had anything at all to do with the torpedoing of a Barsoom franchise.

But…

There is no question that Disney’s seduction of George Lucas was a factor in the supposed commercial failure of John Carter. And when you consider how much George Lucas borrowed from the Barsoom novels for much of what was stitched together to form the Star Wars universe, it is at least darkly ironic that ERB got shafted in the marketplace by the man who profited the most from plundering his legacy. Wait, did I say borrowed? I meant to say stole.

Just check out this partial list of how the father of the Force took rapaciously from every source imaginable.

If George Lucas had any decency, he’d take some of his Disney billions and find a way to finance new Barsoom movies. Or Pellucidar or Venus movies. Otherwise, thanks to the debacle of John Carter, we are probably going to be deprived of any new non-Tarzan ERB adaptations for another generation.

Sigh.

I’ve written elsewhere about the idiocy of studio suits who don’t know how to maximize the value of their classic genre properties. You can obtain a copy of Sellers’ book here.

Crosswinds

March 22, 2013 Men's Adventure Movies No comments

I’ve developed into a John Payne fan lately, discovering many of his later career movies – mostly entertaining, low-budget potboilers. Most viewers will remember Payne as the lawyer who defends Kris Kringle in the original “Miracle on 34th Street.” In his later movies, Payne played some variation of a hard-boiled type: a fading boxer, a wrongly-accused noir hero, a tough guy crook, etc.

“Crosswinds,” released in 1951, is a classic Men’s Adventure story. Payne is the captain of a schooner, rambling about New Guinea, hustling up gigs to pay his way through the South Seas. In port, he crosses paths with another hustler, played by Forrest Tucker, and a boozed up widow, played by Rhonda Fleming. Tucker is searching for a plane wreck filled with $10 million in stolen gold and he hires Payne and his boat to help in the quest. Payne is quickly double-crossed however, and lands in jail and loses his boat. The rest of the movie involves Payne getting the gold, the woman and his boat, with plenty of action along the way.

“Crosswinds” is no masterpiece, but it’s the kind of light fun you could easily help pass an afternoon with. The characters are colorful, especially Alan Mowbray and John Abbott as two sleazy, back-stabbing limeys who make things interesting. Rhonda Fleming is on hand to provide sex appeal, something she was more than capable of. Personally, I’d rank Fleming as one of the top sex kittens of the 1950s. Check out my Pinterest board Drive In Queens, I’ve added a few tasty shots of her.

“Crosswinds” is available on Netflix, along with several other classic John Payne potboilers.

Fight Card: A Mouth Full of Blood

February 24, 2013 Men's Adventure Reading No comments

I just don’t care for Mixed Martial Arts; there’s way too much cuddling and crotch grinding going on in that sport for my liking. Give me two desperate men standing upright, slamming each other’s skulls, blinded by their own blood, wavering on rubber legs on the verge of giving way…that’s a man’s sport!

Which sounds like a scene from the excellent new fiction series: Fightcard. This series revives the tradition of the great fight pulps like Fight Stories or Knockout Magazine. The boxing story was also a longtime, regular staple of the general pulps and later, men’s adventure magazines.

The Fightcard books are all published under the penname Jack Tunney; “A Mouth Full of Blood” was written by Eric Beetner.

“A Mouth Full of Blood” opens as ex-prizefighter Jimmy Wyler returns to Chicago in 1955, trying to put his life back together. Wyler wants to leave fighting behind, but he quickly finds himself entangled with the woes of a good-hearted kid and his sister. To save the sister from the clutches of a vicious pimp, Wyler reluctantly returns to the prizefighting game, at its lowest level: quick-cash illegal fights staged between washed up mooks. Wyler winds up confronting the pimp and his goons; faces get smashed, switchblades get swished, and good triumphs in the end.

The measure of a good boxing tale is the quality of the action, and when the fists fly in “A Mouth Full of Blood,” the action is very good indeed. While the plot and characters are familiar, it’s a comforting familiarity and the book never feels much like mere pastiche. The writing is lean and direct, very suitable to the genre.

I enjoyed my first taste of Fightcard and immediately ordered a few more. If you’re interested in a quick, punchy read, check out:

http://www.bishsbeat.blogspot.com/p/fight-card.html

Eric Beetner’s author page can be found here.

Dog Soldiers

January 28, 2013 Men's Adventure Reading No comments

The early 1970s was a bleary, jagged era. The Vietnam War ended bloodily, an embarrassing failure for America. The sunny promise of flower power degenerated into a grimy panorama of speed freaks, primal scream therapy, and Charles Manson. And the epicenter of the hippie dream – San Francisco – was just as broken and bent as anywhere.

Hunter S. Thompson put it well in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he said: “There was madness in any direction, at any hour.”

Dog Soldiers, written by Robert Stone in 1974, brings that time back to life vividly. Converse is a jaded journalist scraping by in Saigon at war’s end. A junkie ex-girlfriend convinces him to help her move three kilos of heroin back to the US; Converse shanghais an ex-Marine named Hicks to carry the smack back to the States aboard a cargo ship. Waiting for delivery on the other end is Converse’s wife, Marge, who works at a porn theater and is hooked on pain killers. Not surprisingly, things quickly unravel when Hicks arrives in Berkeley with the package. The rest of the novel is a classic, but twisted, love on the run tale, something of a travelogue through the wrecked landscape of post-1960s America. Pursued by crooked drug agents, Hicks and Marge flee through the decadent high society of LA to the crumbling remnants of a hippie commune.

Parts of the book remind me of the stories told to me by a Vietnam Vet Petty Officer I served with, tales of his days as a skip tracer for AWOL servicemen in the Bay area during same period. Once he found someone, he related, he would go to a nearby bar to get slightly sauced, then return to kick open the door with a pistol in one hand, beating the crap out of anyone that confronted him. He was bat shit crazy.

Hicks, the ex-Marine in Dog Soldiers, doesn’t reflect the unfortunate crazy Vietnam Vet stereotype, but he isn’t a well man, either. His flaws predate the war; he is emotionally and sexually repressed due to a rough childhood, and he tends to react with violent paranoia to stress. Hicks does have a personal code, however, – the code of the Samurai – that winds up leading him to sacrifice himself at the end: a noble, if hallucinogenic conclusion.

Converse, on the other hand, is a pathetic figure, agreeing to the ill-advised drug smuggling scheme in part to impress a woman, in part to find himself. In the end, he discovers that he is a miserable failure, as a husband, a father, and a man. Marge is a junkie shadow, and her inability to commit to either man both condemns them and stands in, in a larger symbolic sense, for America’s immoral ambivalence about war.

Dog Soldiers is a hard-boiled slice of men’s adventure, reeking of corruption and sleaze. As someone who grew up during the era, I can attest to it’s enduring value as a reminder of an ugly period in American history.

Dog Soldiers was adapted to film in 1978 as Who’ll Stop The Rain, starring Nick Nolte, Michael Moriarty, and Tuesday Weld. It’s an excellent movie and a very faithful adaptation of the book. It’s one of my personal favorite movies and Nolte’s performance is, I think, the best of his career. Very highly recommended.

And a Bayonet, Sir, With Some Guts Behind It

January 10, 2013 Men's Adventure Movies 5 comments

One of my favorite scenarios is the tale of a small band of brothers, trapped, surrounded, outnumbered, and forced to overcome their deficiencies and differences to triumph manfully. There is no better example of this in the movies than Zulu (1964), a nearly perfect masterpiece of Men’s Adventure cinema.

Zulu tells the true story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, an encounter between a small British Army garrison in South Africa in 1879 and a much larger force of Zulu warriors. Over the course of a day and a half, the valiant redcoats held off the fierce, disciplined attacks of the Zulus, redeeming Britain’s honor somewhat after a massacre of 1,800 empire forces the day previous.

Nearly everyone in the movie – other than the indomitable Color Sergeant Bourne and the brave Zulus – begin the movie as flawed characters. The garrison seems to be made up mostly of slackers and goofballs, one officer (Michael Caine) is a preening aristocrat, the other an engineer sent to build a bridge across the nearby river. It’s far from certain that the motley crew is up the challenge of holding off the massed Zulu attack.

Once the spears start to fly, however, British Infantry training kicks in, spines are stiffened, and even the incorrigible, malingering Private Hook steps up to kill scores of Zulu. Lt. Chard (Stanley Baker) proves to be a tactical wizard, while Lt. Bromhead (Caine) wades into the fray with pistol and bayonet to lead the counter-attack.

The action in Zulu is first-rate, as is the score by Bond maestro John Barry. The cameras sweep along as waves of Zulu warriors charge the barricades and the action pauses for small moments in the midst of the carnage that add humor and pathos. (Private Hook stealing a mouthful of contraband brandy in the middle of the flaming hospital, Welsh Private Owen fretting over a sick calf, sorrow and stoicism battling on Color Sergeant Bourne’s face as he takes roll after the battle and ticks off the dead, etc.)

The final assault is a classic sequence: it begins with the Zulus singing a defiant war chant, answered by the British belting out the rousing “Men of Harlech,” climaxes with the blistering muzzle blast of the last stand’s volley fire by rank, ending with heaps of Zulu dead laid at the feet of the redcoats.

Zulu was directed and co-written by blacklisted writer/director Cy Endfield, who also directed my favorite Ray Harryhausen film: Mysterious Island (1961). That’s another rousing title, although more in the standard adventure realm than gritty Men’s Adventure.

Other than a few brief moments of overwrought melodrama, Zulu is a note perfect film. It has enough modern touches, like respect for Africans and distaste for war (while glorifying it) that it holds up well over time. At the same time, it exalts timeless values like sacrifice, honor, and manly forbearance while glorifying the “Thin Red Line.”

Manly Forbearance = “Essential masculine qualities of self-control; restraint and tolerance.”

Here is a link to a splendid painting of The Battle of Rorke’s Drift by Alphonse de Neuville.

The Beatnik Spy Pinterest Boards

January 6, 2013 Men's Adventure Art No comments

Do you love beautiful women with natural attributes? Do you admire tough heroes who smoke and drink? Do you think William Shatner is the Mack Daddy?

Check out the following Beatnik Spy Pinterest boards:

60′s Vixens

Drive-In Queens

Real Heroes Drink Liquor

Smoking IS Cool

Shatner Mack Attack

007′s Modern Sex Appeal

November 27, 2012 Men's Adventure Movies, Men's Adventure Reading No comments

Who’s sexier: Daniel Craig or Sean Connery?

Or is it Cary Grant vs. Tom Cruise?

I’m writing this rumination in response to Richard Cohen’s piece in the Washington Post “James Bond and the New Sex Appeal.” In his piece, Cohen rues the transformation of 007 from a suave charmer in a tuxedo into a brawling, pec-flexing, scowling ape. Well, maybe that’s putting it too strongly, but he definitely prefers his Bond to seduce rather than conquer and to outwit rather than outlast.

“He (Connery) was 53 when he made his last Bond film, “Never Say Never Again.” Women loved him because he was sophisticated and he could handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin. Western civilization was saved not on account of his pecs but on account of his cleverness and experience.”

Of course, Cohen overlooks the rather rapey “seduction” of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and Connery’s frequent shirt removals in the original series. It can’t be helped that the standards for bare chests has moved from hairy to sculpted.

But Cohen seems also to be calling for a return to movie heroes who are decades older than their female bed mates which is kind of icky. Nobody is as nauseated by the current craze for vapid YA-oriented protagonists as me, but as a fellow middle-ager, I would prefer my heroes to be a little more credible than a creaky Roger Moore or toupeed Sean Connery.

Audiences are more sophisticated today and won’t settle for long shots of obvious stuntmen or closeups of the star framed against a matte shot. You need to convince them that your hero is really getting the crap beat out of them or is genuinely in danger of falling from the roof of a speeding train. In that vein, I think Daniel Craig’s robust masculinity is just right for a 21st Century 007. Hopefully the Bond series continues to present a more realistic – if rougher – 007 and forgoes space lasers, invisible cars, and actors with girdles and hairpieces.

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