Word: crooner
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...said in 1992, "and I was his luggage." That's very sweet. But to think that Dean carried Jerry is the biggest joke of their career. Lewis, a genius at playing an idiot, was the brains of the act, Martin the gonads. So it surprised some that when the crooner went solo in 1956, he not only could get movie roles but could fill them handsomely. They were, to be sure, tailored to his talent--alcoholics and playboys--and in them he moved easily: as the cowardly G.I. in The Young Lions or the sodden gambler in Some Came Running...
Martin lasted so long by embracing show-biz contradictions, then shrugging them off. For a start, he was a traditional crooner who learned intonation from Crosby and salesmanship from Jolson. Yet there was a hint in his gestures (eyes closed in ecstasy, arms stretched out imploringly) that he was parodying the very idea of crooner; he was a mellow modernist. You could also peg Dino as an anachronism, a Joe E. Lewis saloon-lush type, the party animal in a tux. Or maybe he was the first slacker, elevating sloth to a Zen art. The stupefaction he radiated...
...With three marriages far behind him, he spent his final years dining alone nightly at an Italian eatery in Beverly Hills. At home this past Christmas Eve, he was attended only by a nurse. She gave him a last drink--water!--and he died. No grieving, please: the cowboy crooner finally rode off into the oblivion he always seemed to crave. And, as Dino might have observed, it beats working...
...most entertaining cuts show the Beatles' early gift for parody. You'll Be Mine, a Lennon-McCartney jape from 1960, suggests a Five Satins love song as it might have been tortured by a fourth-rate crooner in a Blackpool pub. John offers a basso-preposteroso spoken verse: "My darlin'...I looked into your eyes, and I could see a National Health eyeball..." The band brought the same proto-camp tone to covers of Three Cool Cats and Sheik of Araby, on a failed audition tape for Decca Records on New Year's Day, 1962. Raw and cheeky, the Beatles...
...psychos as Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Boston and Hillside Stranglers--that crowd. His pursuer is a crafty cop (Holly Hunter). His nemesis is a psychologist (Sigourney Weaver) who studies the serial killer's mentality. And his hero is a recently arrested multiple murderer (cleverly played by saloon crooner Harry Connick Jr. as if he were a more deranged cousin of Jim Varney's goony Ernest character...