There's a time to play Monopoly and a time to kick over the board and throw the play money in the air like we're motherfuckin' Scarface. Miami Blues (1990) is for that time. Those of us who love charismatic maniacs, especially when they're safely contained in the confines distance, time, or the screen, love this movie. Hopelessly sane writers and artists, we need the semi-benevolent destructive playfulness that can only be found in certain rare 'awakened' megalomaniacs, to spark our pens to life. Such a sparker is Junior (Alec Baldwin) in Blues. He is the expression of our id-unleashing dreams. It stands proud as a herald for the maniac renaissance of the early 90s: Mr. Blonde, Mickey and Mallory Knox, Wendy Kroy, Hannibal Lecter, Tommy in Goodfellas, Harvey in Bad Lieutenant, Lisa in Girl, Interrupted... And Junior.
That manic early 90s phase is long gone now, but for awhile cinema was a bonfire full of toothsome chestnuts.
Directed by that shaggy dog beachcomber director George Armitage, Blues is a violent Marx Bros opus writ large in the deadpan Elmore Leonard Miami. Allegedly about hangdog cop Hank Moseley (Fred Willard) loping after Junior for a bullshit manslaughter charge, it's really more about... well, maybe less than the sum of its parts. But what parts! Jennifer Jason Leigh as a dimwitted prostitute Junior plays house with, lots and lots of freeform random crimes of utmost ballsiness, and maximum vengeance against cops who eat his pork chops. Junior may be insane but he has ethics: robbing crack dealers with a plastic Uzi, mugging pickpockets for the wallets they stole, knocking over bookies, and--in the best sequences--all while playing cop with Mosely's stolen badge. There's no rhyme or reason to Junior's actions, but everything is logical because he acts on our expectations. If we see a robbery in progress we naturally assume he'll try to stop it, so he does even if all he has to hand a jar of spaghetti sauce. If Pedro seems a little too cocky with his shotgun at the pawn shop, it's natural Junior will shoot him as soon as his back is turned, etc. Why? Like the scorpion drowning atop his frog raft, it his nature.
There's no other way to really contextualize the anarchy at work here, unless we can glean the Marx Brothers connection within Junior's initial alias, Herman Gottlieb. A way more obscure reference than, say, Zombie's Firefly family, Gottlieb is the name Sig Ruman's ever-fuming, Mrs. Claypool-flattering Baroni-signer in MGM's Night at the Opera (1935), I know this for it is a film I saw so many times as a kid that its textures and rhythms cloak me still in a kind of cinephile temple garment. And it's that connection holds the secret to the madness of Baldwin's maniacal character. His genius lies in that same crazy Marx-Lugosi "life is but a dream" row-row yer way straight out the Truman Show bubble direction. Forever caught in an old world (pre-WW2) bourgeois slow burn harrumph as Groucho dances verbal circles around him and Harpo sets his shoes on fire, it's only natural that old Mr. Gottlieb would eventually get his wallet lifted and identity stolen by a light-fingered Harpo out of hell, for how can we measure the high crusting curves of madness without a straight edge with no sense of self awareness to impede its accuracy?
 |
| The real Herman Gottlieb (Sig Ruman) center, and top right |
HERE'S TO DEAR OLD BALDWIN:Most guys as good looking as Alec are, let's face it, dull as chalk - and many still are just as dull even after age does a Jake LaMotta on their kisser. Occupied with making sure their hair is werewolf perfect and their best angle camera-ward for so long they forget to accrue depth, no emotion on their face lest wrinkles appear, they come across often as drugged narcissist automatons drained of all wit and regular guy who-gives-a-fuckitude, empty aquariums filled with air dank with the kind of self-righteous petulance they're convinced is the height of butch charisma. With his Irish-American twinkle alight in his eyes, though, and whatever the age, Baldwin comes off as real, even when he's acting the part of a charming actor who knows he's fake. We know guys like him, and he's a cipher without being a bore. He's charming without being cocky, crazy without being aggravating. Better actors can't say that, nor worse ones. He has the glint of real madness in his eyes, the kind you can't fake or buy, the kind that's too playful to be destructive, too cool to get hung up on phony sentiment.
A lot of us kids who grew up with the Marx Brothers and the Lugosi collection (and then completed our teenage years as snotty poseurs with Repo Man) were left in the cold at the end of the 80s. In the pre-Tarantino-verse of 1990, Blues stood alone. We fans had a dupe of it on tape of course, and have long grown used to the blurry pastel streaks of the decor and sky, the fuzzy short hair cuts of both Junior and Susie reduced to a blurry halo. With the new Shout Blu-ray its all sharp and clear, with a nice lovely sparkle to the sea and sky and deep 3-D blacks to every sun-dappled shadow. The 80s pastels are no longer as wearisome and the transfer is so sharp you can smell the salt and suntan oil. Extras include interviews with Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who both admit really enjoying themselves with the project and characters and each other, and it shows.
In other words, a bourgeois white elephant filmgoer will not approve of Miami Blues, which seems like an open invitation to the underclasses to rise up and boot them from their homes like Bane in Dark Knight Rises. But Bane was a drag. We loved The Joker, because like Junior, he keeps his grip on the termite megalomania of early childhood, and so has no urge to burn out the white elephant hoi poloi except via silver screen termite effigy. All that rage we used to excise via the now outgrown release mechanism of temper tantrums building up and up through early adolescence, it was just waiting for a miracle like Bela Lugosi in The Raven or Harpo Marx in Night at the Opera to release it. Out comes in gushing waves of joy, an air pocket of tyrannical childhood, the good with the bad all buried now rising like an oil gusher, lifting us up off the surface of our becalmed flat stoned moviegoing consciousness in a most pleasing way.
One wild man performance is worth three movies worth of 'importance' or 'meaning.'
We see Junior's kind of kinetic free-form insanity so seldom, especially in today's nanny state clime, that when it comes along in the form of a Baldwin it's like a precious little match in the Hans Christian Anderson blizzard of safe sanctified sanity, riding the glint of madness that takes that fluttery match and lights up the sky for just long enough we see the vastness of heaven. And then the match is out, the sky is dark, the house lights come back up, the veil of paralyzing self-consciousness descends once more like a clingy Psycho shower curtain, and not even Fred Willard can be held accountable for what we do to try and get the fire back. We wind up in rehab, or as deranged loners, buried deep in our bomb shelters, watching our Night of the Opera -The Thing - My Man Godfrey - tape over and over til the tracking button can do no more...
PRINCETON BLUES:
And if you know you're in a dream, and beyond all fear, why wouldn't you go a little nuts? The way Baldwin's crazy act with the badge goes down, it's actually true that he's a dead ringer for an old friend of mine (through another friend) from the Princeton Blues Traveler days, Percheur (not his real name), a crazy Bill Brasky type of larger than life maniac who was a living legend amongst the local mix of debauched upper dregs at the 80s hippie-music-Princeton Record Exchange / Hoagie Haven / stealing badges to crash the Princeton reunions / pre-fame Blues Traveler / I told (you already) Althea gave me her last double purple barrel - contingent.
 |
| That Percheur he a some boy all right. |
Percheur (not his real name) didn't do this to impress anyone. He didn't even know anyone was watching (and I was the only one). I pretended not to notice and refrained from looking at him as the guy he hit, a huge motherfucker in a frat jersey, started running right toward the car behind which Percheur hid, and then he took off into the scrub brush. Percheur spent the rest of the party on the run, coming back to the keg periodically like a renewable kick the can. To this day it's the single most amazing throw I've ever seen -- he never even aimed or even looked at the guy directly before throwing it. Even when fighting or being chased he never seemed like it was anything but a friendly scrap with a old buddy. That's the kind of love wherein you can fight and still be Zen. I preach this now, in my other life.
But that story is nothing, Max shrugged it off as lesser Percheur. Last Max heard of him was 20 years ago when--inspired by Miami Blues--he stole a fireman's badge and was pulling over cars on the road to fuck with them and/or steal their drugs. And they called him from then on Princeton Blues.
---
Soon after of course the neighborhood was smotten by Blues Traveller's success, and while they were on tour, the rest of the crowd would be smoking god knows what, watching pre-code WB gangster movies on TCM, which I respected. I still have the tape they made me of Two Seconds, Picture Snatcher and Beast of the City. (TCM was rare back then, most cable companies didn't have it). And like pre-code WB film, Miami Blues man flies free while we.... oops it fell. As we all did. But that's the arc of a gangster. It ends and its time for teeth to be returned from whence they came. Walter Brennan in Red River asking for them back 'come grub' after losing them in a poker game to Chief Yowlachie, now called 2Jaw Quo. Detective Gummo, your teeth had never ground so free as they did in this man's hand; he carried them above the clouds, and he carried them atop the spirit frog he could not refrain from biting. Bite him back.
 |
| "come chow, you get |