Word: gangsters
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...Benton shows that both the city and its underworld have changed is through the type of gangster he has Welles and Margo run up against. In the old days, the dangerous guys wore white pin stripes, ran gambling houses and could stay civil with private eyes because they invariably had the police in their pockets. (They said gentlemanly things like, "I'm nice to be nice to. I'm not nice not to be nice to.") In this new world the chief hood (played by a corpulent Eugene Roche) runs a hot vehicles and appliances operation--that...
...people or Dardis. Aldous Huxley, more successful in Dardis's terms because he made more money than Faulkner, spent his last years in Hollywood meditating on his own limitations. Nathanael West, forgotten in the basement of a second-rate studio where he slaved night and day to write cheap gangster flicks, had his vengeance in The Day of the Locust; where all of America was portrayed as a Hollywood burlesque. And James Agee, who left lucrative positions as film critic for Time and The Nation to write screenplays finished his days writing sad, haunting scripts of empty hotels and circus...
Hard Dollar. It is not simply that Alex is a fool for punishment. He makes his living from it. He pulls down a hard dollar as a bail bondsman and indulges in much gruff whimsy during working hours. "What's the good word?" a gangster client asks him innocently. Alex pounces: "Sunset is a good word. Pretzel is a good word." At last, the gypsy stirring in her soul, Maritza jumps the bail that Alex has posted for her assault rap and heads for Mazatlán in a private plane, accompanied by a rich gent with a lickerish...
Oshima extrapolated the film from a real incident. In Tokyo in the 1930s, a prostitute concluded her love affair with a gangster by castrating him, then wandered the streets for several days carrying his severed sex organs. Haunted by Genet and Mishima, animated by memories of De Sade, Oshima splashes a devious course to this bloody resolution. He has the gangster and the whore coupling incessantly, in attitudes reminiscent of the delicate rough-and-tumble of erotic Japanese watercolors. The point of all this-that the full realization of passion is its own justification, that death is the ultimate orgasm...
...with their less disillusioned colleague, Aldous Huxley, would have been surprised to learn that a few years after Faulkner made these remarks, two writers again turned toward Hollywood in search of the American ideal. Nathaniel West, slaving in a B-grade studio to reduce the images of silver screen gangster sagas to flicks like The Black Coin where a young hero, wearing a white sweater, is attacked regularly by four burly men in black, turned the ideal upside down. In The Day of the Locust America became a Hollywood burlesque...