The Plot Podcast - Episode 13 - Don't Mess Around With Jim

If you come at him, you better not miss.

Although we cover sports (and pseudo sports) here, we felt it was better to have our tribute to the late great Jim Brown, who passed away this week, was to analyze a small part of his popular culture career, by looking at some of his most-famous Blaxploitation films.

Brown made two films as the Green Beret turned Mob enemy Slaughter, in Slaughter (1972) and Slaughter’s Big Rip Off (1973). In the first, he squares off against the psychotic Rip Torn and in the second, the mob boss tried to take out Slaughter is … Ed McMahon?

Maybe Brown’s best known genre role was as Jimmy in Three The Hard Way, which is like The Blaxploitation Avengers, where he teams up with Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and martial artist Jim Kelly to fight a white supremacist group out to poison the black population of Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington, DC.

If you like old school 1970s violence with plenty of fights, shoot outs and car chases, along with some gratuitous nudity, these pictures are for you. (That presumes you all know about all the cultural mores of the genre, especially the language and the racism.)

We had planned on including the Richard Pryor routine about Jim Brown, but it was just too many bleeps to add for a five minute routine. Listen to it when you get the chance; one of my favorite all-time favorite comedy albums.

The Plot - Episode 5 - French New Wave

A looby card for Shoot the Piano Player.

With the recent passing of Jean-Luc Godard, we look at three French New Wave heist films: Shoot the Piano Player, Band of Outsiders and Le Doulos.

We start with a very cursory explanation of the French New Wave, Cahiers du Cinema and the influence of Post WWII gangster films, what we would later call film noir: private eyes, trench coats and fedoras, femmes fatale, chiascuro lighting and so on. (Apologies to all my former film professor for some very brief oversimplifications.)

Shoot the Piano Player (1960) was Truffaut’s second film after The 400 Blows. It’s the story of a piano man with a dark secret, his ne’er-do-brothers, some gangsters and the bar maid that has a crush on the piano man and who also knows his secret. Plenty of humor in this often-dark movie.

Band of Outsiders (1964) is often called Godard’s most accessible film, thanks to its straightforward plot, humor and pop references. Two guys and a girl plan to steal a pile of cash from the villa where the girl Odile (Anna Karina) lives nearly. There’s also the burgeoning love triangle between Odile and the two guys, Franz and Arthur. And a lot of silliness before the robbery, where, of course, things go wrong.

Le Doulos (1962) was one of many crime films made by Jean-Pierre Melville, who is sometimes called “The Godfather of the French New Wave” since he was making films before the Cahiers critics and mentored some of them along the way. Le Doulos was the slang term for a police informant and the question is the film is just who was tipped off the police to the heist being pulled by Maurice and Remy? Was it Silien, the film’s trench coat and fedora wearing gangster, played by perennial French New Wave star Jean-Paul Belmondo? Or was it someone else? You need a score card to keep track of the twists and turns, as the body count grows throughout the picture.

There are of course many other heist films worth checking out. These three are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max and Prime also have a number of French New Wave classics. We wanted to talk about Rififi, but it’s not currently streaming anywhere, so we’re saving that for another day.

The Plot is a co-production of Odessa Steps Magazine and The When It Was Cool Network.

The Plot - Episode 4 - Inspector Clouseau / The Inspector

The Inspector and The Matzoriley Brothers, from The Great De Gualle Stone Operation. (C) 2022 MGM.

In this episode, we look at what happens when a studio makes a sequel without its creator and without its star and its more successful cartoon analog.

In 1968, Mirisch Films decided to make a third Pink Panther without Blake Edwards, Peter Sellers and Henry Mancini. And we got Inspector Clouseau, directod by veteran comedy producer/director Bud Yorkin and starring Alan Arkin, in between making The Russians Are Coming and Catch-22. If every a film was less than the sum of its parts, it’s this film, which just doesn’t work on so many levels. But its an interesting study in what happens when you remove the creators that make something special.

We also take a look at The Inspector, the animated film/tv series that actually preceded the aforementioned film by three years. The second animated spin-off series from the Pink Panther franchise debuted a year after the first Pink Panther cartoon won an Oscar. The Inspector (and his assistant Doux-Doux) are voiced by Pat Harrington Jr and The Commissioner is originally voiced by the recently-departed Larry Storch and later by Paul Frees. There were 34 cartoons eventually made for either the movies or Saturday morning TV, with such great episodes titles as Napoleon Blown Aparte and Toulouse La Trick. Full of traditional cartoon gags like exploding bombs and surrealistic situations, your tolerance for them in 2022 may be determined by your tolerance for comedy French and Spanish accents.

The Plot - Episode 2 - The Lavender Hill Mob / Card Shark

He loves only gold. Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) in The Lavender Hill Mob.

The Plot returns with a look at one of the greatest heist comedies in film history, 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob., starting Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway. We discuss the film’s plot, how a mild-mannered bank clerk masterminds a robbery of an armored car full of gold. We also give some background on the film, Ealing Studios, some of the creators behind the scenes and its filming.

We also give a quick shout to the new video game Card Shark, a tale of grifting and card cheating in Pre-Revolutionary France. We hope to have some of the folks behind the game on a future episode of the Winter Palace Podcast.

Thanks for listening. Be sure to listen to the other shows on the When It Was Cool Network.