Word: janssen
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Warning Shot is the kind of film that was a fixture of the Forties: a lawman, framed for murder, tries to clear himself in a race against the clock. In this case, the cop on the lam is David Janssen, the long-distance runner of television's Fugitive...
...spoor of a sex killer, Janssen sees a suspect draw a pistol-and promptly guns him down. The victim turns out to be a widely respected M.D. When the doctor's pistol cannot be found, Berkeley-style pickets cry police brutality, and a grand jury indicts Janssen on a manslaughter charge. Eventually even California's finest turn their backs on one of their own. With less than ten days before trial time, he goes on a solo search for the missing gun and the story behind it. Running down false leads and blind alleys, Janssen caroms...
...Janssen's savage and savagely portrayed world is in many ways familiar. The lineal ancestry of brutish whores and demonic cripples, bloated dwarfs and twisted drunkards, perverted bourgeois and browbeaten soldiers can clearly be traced back to Durer and then down through George Grosz. In his wispy cloudlike sketches and pastels lurks the orchidaceous venom of Odilon Redon. In his zinc-plated etchings there are shades of Max Beckmann. One, entitled Klee and Ensor Fighting over a Smoked Herring, acknowledges the artist's debt to both...
...echoes, West German critics are unanimously agreed that Janssen, 37, has a substance of his own. "He distills from tradition," said Süddeutsche Zeitung. He also distills from experience. The illegitimate son of a seamstress, Janssen spent his adolescence in an SS training academy, became an alcoholic by the age of 22, ran a liquor parlor hard by Hamburg's reeking Reeperbahn, served seven months in jail in 1951-52 for stabbing his fiancée in the abdomen in a fit of jealous rage...
Since those days, Janssen has reformed somewhat; he now concentrates on portraying Gothic horror instead of experiencing it. He lives in a crumbling Hamburg apartment house with his handsome blonde third wife, Verena, the wealthy granddaughter of one of Kaiser Wilhelm's last Chancellors, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, and their five-year-old son. Others may find his pictures macabre, but he maintains: "For me, whatever I do is not ugly, not horrible, not repulsive. I couldn't draw what I don't love...