John Saxon in The Glove

(This blog is part of the John Saxon Blogathon hosted by Realweegiemidget and Cinematic Catharsis)

Following Enter the Dragon (1973), directors (I’m hesitant to say Hollywood) began to see John Saxon in a different light – that of action hero – leading to his appearing in a string of adventure films through the rest of 1970s, including The Swiss Conspiracy (1975), Raid on Entebbe (1977) and several Italian crime/action flicks among others. The final film in that run was The Glove (1979).

John Saxon: If the glove fits

Saxon plays Sam Kellog, an ex-cop turned bounty hunter, six months behind in child-support payments and experiencing a full-blown existential crisis, doubting his career choice, waxing nostalgic over his pre-cop minor league baseball days and generally confused by his purpose in life.

(We know this because director/screenwriter Ross Hagen's script has Saxon provide voiceover narration about “the emptiness in my gut,” or “when you live on the edge, one push and you’re over” and “a bounty hunter does things the police can’t.”)

When Kellog catches wind of a $20,000 reward for the capture of Victor Hale (Rosey Grier), an ex-con suspected of the brutal murders of several prison guards, this is the opportunity for him to at least solve his financial woes.

Hale was beaten in jail by prison guards using an outlawed riot glove, described as “five pounds of lead and steel.” He now has his own version of the glove and with revenge on his mind, he punches through a car windshield to get at one victim and destroys a bathroom while beating another. This is no Nintendo power glove.

Kellog and Hale play cat-and-mouse before an epic showdown on the roof of Hale’s apartment building. They beat each other silly before Kellog concedes defeat, but as Hale offers to escort Kellog from the building a rival bounty hunter suddenly shows up, leading to Hale’s death as well as that of the bounty hunter when residents of the building take matters into their own hands avenging a death of “one of their own.”

You might say (if you’re corny enough and I guess I am) that the role of Sam Kellog fits Saxon like a glove. He’s a complex character, whether interacting with his grade-school daughter, joking – a fluffed line that was kept in the movie – with his kibbitzing boss (Keenan Wynn) or providing cynicism and world-weariness in his narration. Saxon even does his own stunts, including a fight with a bail-skipper in a meat-packing plant, which includes using animal parts as weapons.

After a successful career in pro football, Rosey Grier moved on to TV and films, including The Thing with Two Heads (1972), and becoming almost better known as a macrame and needlepoint enthusiast. In The Glove, when he’s not beating people to death, he’s a gentle giant playing guitar, befriending a neighborhood kid, driving a Country Squire station wagon and shopping for groceries (he buys a bouquet of flowers for his shabby apartment).

Along with Grier, the supporting cast also includes Joanna Cassidy, Keenan Wynn, Michael Pataki, Jack Carter, Aldo Ray and Joan Blondell (her final role before her death). 

The Glove can feel a bit schizophrenic. When Saxon is onscreen tracking down bail jumpers and bemoaning his lot in life, the film takes on a noirish quality. When the focus is on Grier, the vibe is one of Blaxploitation. Overall, the film has the feel of an extended TV pilot, serving to introduce Sam Kellog and his world to viewers.

Either way, the movie holds its own as an action film, John Saxon playing a hero who is a Hamlet for 1970s: plagued by self-doubt and uncertainty while outfitted in an Adidas track suit (the jacket fashionably unzipped enough to show off his bare chest).

Bad company

While they may picture themselves as The Avengers or The Justice League coming to save us from rising egg prices and DEI hiring practices, the next administration’s cabinet appointments, a cavalcade of the weird and unqualified, seem more reminiscent of the old Marvel super-villain teams, dangerous but ultimately second-rate bad guys with dubious superpowers, laughable costumes and names. 

Any of these names are probably available at the right price for a plaque nailed to this next cabinet’s clubhouse door. 

The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants: Super-villains team brought together by ideology: mutant superiority (homo superior) over humans (homo sapiens). Magneto recruited Scarlet Witch and

Quicksilver by rescuing them from an angry mob in their “Central European” home. Mastermind, a John Carradine lookalike, had a creepy interest in the much younger Scarlet Witch. Toad’s name described his springy bouncing ability and how he toadied up to Magneto. Magneto wasn’t much on team building; the Brotherhood quarreled endlessly. 

Sinister Six: A team-up of some Spider-Man’s initial rogue’s gallery: Sandman and Electro (with no lessons learned, both would join other subsequent super-villain teams), plus Mysterio, Kraven the Hunter, de facto leader Dr. Octopus and the Vulture. Together, they never add up to anything greater than the sum of their raw talent as they insist on going after Spidey individually and not as a united front. 

Frightful Four: The Wizard, Sandman and the immortal Paste Pot Pete (who changed his name to the Trapster to keep superheroes from laughing themselves silly) couldn’t beat the Human Torch singly in any of his early solo adventures, yet somehow when they added Medusa of the Inhumans they defeated the Fantastic Four once and had them on the ropes a second time, a storyline that launched a two-year run of issues of the Fantastic Four that to my mind has always been The Great American Comic Book Novel. 

Emissaries of Evil: Daredevil’s laughable archenemies band together to no effect. Electro and the Gladiator, with twin circular saws on his wrists could be formidable, but the rest of this crew? The Matador would throw his cape over a foe’s head to create confusion. Scary. Stilt Man wore a telescoping device on his legs that extended his height. That’s it. Top-heavy at best, he may be the dumbest villain concept ever except for another Emissary of Evil, Leap Frog with his exoskeleton frog costume, complete with webbed feet. 

The Fellowship of Fear: Mr. Fear’s contribution was fear pheromones from gas pellets shot from a special gun. According to an online Marvel database, he recruited Ox and The Eel primarily because of their low intelligence, making them easier to control. The Eel was a classic Marvel second-banana bad guy. Ox was Lenny from Of Mice and Men. The sightless (but with other senses enhanced Daredevil) knows Ox is around by his heavy breathing and “cheap hair tonic” – the first time Vitalis contributed to the bring down of a super-villain team.

One final last at bat

On October 6, 1985, at Shea Stadium against the Montreal Expos, Rusty Staub was the final batter of the Mets’ season.

The Mets will finish second place and with Darryl Strawberry (23 years old, 27 home runs) and Dwight Gooden (20 years old, 24-4 record), anchoring a young and talented team, the Mets are primed for promise.

Almost in anticipation of ticker-tape parades to come, the fans are shredding paper and throwing it onto the field: hot dog wrappers, pages torn from programs, newspapers, toilet paper, falling to the ground or getting swept up into a current circling the inside of Shea Stadium.

From WWOR's game broadcast, 10/6/85

Staub watches paper falling through the air and fouls off the first two pitches, then takes a ball. Indifferent ownership, the inability to get funding for a new stadium, dropping attendance and other economic pressures over the coming two decades would tip the scale in favor of a relocation, and in 2004, the Expos became the Washington Nationals.

Another pitch out of the strike zone for a ball. Staub began his major league career as a 19-year-old with the Houston Astros in 1963; Shea Stadium opened the following year as a multi-purpose stadium built for baseball and football. Aging badly and with the trend towards stadiums built expressly for baseball (while acknowledging a certain old-time vibe – archways, brick facades, distinctive angles to the outfields), Shea was demolished in 2009, replaced by Citi Field.

He calls time, distracted by more paper falling from the rightfield grandstand. The count goes to three balls and two strikes. Never a Hall of Famer, but certainly a first-ballot induction in any mythical Hall of the Nearly Great, Staub retired that winter to organize charitable programs and focus on his Manhattan restaurant, Rusty's, specializing in steaks and ribs. Nearly 30 years to the day of his final at bat, on a flight from Ireland to the U.S., he went into cardiac arrest. Two doctors on board assisted in resuscitating him. He died in 2018, three days before his 74th birthday.

The last swing of the bat is a grounder to the Montreal second baseman, who bobbles the ball but still throws the slow-running Staub out at first. Even the best batters succeed only three out of ten times. The field is littered with white paper, resembling a tentative late autumn snowfall that barely covers the grass, a reminder that winter is right around the corner.

The last at bat

For sustained brilliance in writing about baseball there is Roger Angell. But the greatest one-hit wonder is John Updike’s only venture into sports reporting. His 1960 essay about Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams’ final game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” is not just amazing writing, but a masterpiece of production against a hard deadline. While a good portion of the essay was likely thought-out in advance, Updike turned around 6000 words about a game played on September 28 in time for the October 20 edition of The New Yorker.   

Updike was a fan, offering no alibis for Williams’ behavior. Williams was a complex player, disliked by many fans and reporters alike. The product of a broken home, he was moody and quixotic in his belief that playing baseball might be much more enjoyable (for him) without those sports writers or fans watching. A view, Updike points out, that may have cost Williams not just plenty of goodwill, but two MVP trophies, which are voted on by the baseball writers. 

The author gets off a couple of wonderful and insightful lines: 

The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence. 

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. 

As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. 

(If the use of the word “color” in that last quite is a potshot at the American Leagues’ lack of urgency when it came to integration, it is subtle but well taken). 

Updike also got a storybook ending: Williams’ final plate appearance was a solo home run in the eighth inning: Williams etching in own career epitaph within the epitaph Updike had written. The Red Sox were scheduled for three final games, in New York versus the Yankees. Williams chose not to accompany the team. “So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit,” is how Updike ended the piece. 

Updike wrote frequently about sports in his fiction. His most famous character, Rabbit Angstrom, was a star high school basketball player who found everything in life sour and anti-climactic after graduation. There’s a lot of golf playing in the Rabbit books and in his novel about swinging suburbia, Couples. 

If he often found sports a useful metaphor, it’s fitting that Ted Williams hitting a home run in his final career at bat could serve as a comparison to Updike’s high-pressure delivery of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” one of the high points in a lifetime of writing, within 30 days.

Incredibly, footage of Ted Williams' final home run exists:

Jigsaw puzzles of the damned 

One of the cultural kid crazes of the sixties was the obsession with monsters. For a few years, I got caught up in it in a big way. Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Aurora monster models. Monster wallets. Monster figures. If it had anything to do with Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon or the Mummy, I was in. 

One Christmas, I received this: 

The box is a little rough now, something like 60 years later, but it’s complete, no missing pieces: 

The finished puzzle tells a pretty terrifying story, as the artist crammed as much as possible into a nightmarish scene: the sobbing woman, a hooded ghoul emerging from a coffin, the lizard and cat going after a corpse, a rattlesnake for some reason, prison bars and the mummy carrying some poor guy in the process of being mummified while still alive. 

The puzzle was made by the Jaymar Specialty Company of Brooklyn, started by Jacob Marx, father of famed toy manufacturer Louis Marx. Jaymar produced mostly wooden toys, including any number of puzzles based on licensed characters (Disney, Archie, Blondie). In 1963, Jaymar issued four monster puzzles: Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman and the Mummy. 

More coffins and dungeons. The guy lying on the operating table in the lower left has a hypodermic needle sticking out of his neck making a puddle of blood. Fun stuff when you're ten years old. 

According to one price guide, “parental objection to these gruesome puzzles soon led to Jaymar’s discontinuation of them.” I couldn’t find any other details, but if true, the puzzles belong in the same childhood limbo as Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” Chinese Cherry Funny Face drink mix and the Frito Bandito. Vanished, thanks to the whim of some supposedly well-meaning adults. 

The monster craze began to diminish for me with the discovery of Marvel Comics and the Beatles, and as I told myself that it was time to put childish things away, I donated the puzzle to a Cub Scout auction. A quarter burning a hole in my pocket, I realized I'd made a mistake. 

I was the only bidder. Reunited.

I don't care if I never get back 

My hometown of Hackensack is roughly ten miles from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium. That’s a relatively easy commute if you work there and during the 1960s, before baseball players became richer than God, several Yankees rented summer residences in the area. 

Elston Howard settled year-round in Teaneck, one town over. Mickey Mantle was said to be in nearby River Edge. Tom Tresh and Andy Kosco lived in my neighborhood. Tresh a couple of blocks over; Kosco, in his only season with New York, rented a place maybe fifteen houses up from mine. 

The more famous Tresh was American League Rookie of the Year in 1962 and one of the heroes of the 1962 World Series. He played nine seasons in the infield and outfield, and played in two All-Star Games. 

In a ten-year career, Kosco played for seven teams. He is also peripherally connected to two events that helped frame 1970s baseball: he was traded from the Yankees to the Dodgers for Mike Kekich, who is best remembered for swapping families with fellow Yankee Fritz Peterson in 1973. The Dodgers later traded Kosco to Milwaukee for Al Downing, who allowed Hank Aaron’s 715^th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s record. 

I can’t say that we ever saw either ballplayer out mowing the grass or holding a garden hose to the lawn. Their days were likely spent sleeping or watching television before heading out to work. We nodded in acknowledgement as we rode our bikes past their homes, although we never went knocking on their front doors looking for autographs. Possibly we saw them for what they were: ordinary guys roughly our parents’ age (maybe a little younger) who worked weird hours at a strange job. 

What we didn’t realize was that the best time to catch Tresh or Kosco was likely late at night, when much of the neighborhood was dark except for the occasional living room cast in the light from a television screen. Home from the game, sitting on a front step or in the backyard maybe with a beer and a cigarette. Out from the heat of the day, and from under the unblinking glare of the stadium’s high-intensity lights. Listening to the same crickets and far-off police sirens I heard while lying in my bed. 

Times change and summer nights pass quickly, along with childhood and the freedoms that came with it. What we’re left with are summer evenings that will never feel quite the same again.

Get Carter 

(This post is part of the Rule, Britannia Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

In Get Carter (1970), London gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) returns to his hometown of Newcastle to investigate the sudden and mysterious death of his brother. When he finds that his brother was murdered and his niece (who may be Carter’s daughter) was steered into making a pornographic movie, Carter relentlessly and violently tracks down everyone involved. (And without giving away too much, Carter the hunter has no idea that he’s also being hunted). 

“British gangsters were seen as silly or funny in the movies, and I knew from my background that all of the above wasn’t true,” said Caine. Carter may have a subtle sense of humor, but he’s also uncompromising, with a slow-burning temper that builds quickly into sudden violence. Immoral, as you’d expect from someone in his profession, but with a strong sense of family honor. 

Filmed on location, Newcastle’s rowhouses, outdoor plumbing and beach blackened with coal waste provide a grim setting. As Carter travels there by train, director Mike Hodges shows fleeting glimpses of the countryside, including several nuclear power plants, signaling that the glory days of Newcastle, once the center of a huge coal mining area, are vanishing. 

Back in Newcastle, Carter throws money around to smooth over any problems and shows off his slick metropolitan ways at the local pub when he orders a pint of bitter, then hesitates, adding “in a thin glass.” When his niece tells him she’s left school for a job at Woolworths, his deadpan, “That must be very interesting,” says it all about his contempt for his past life. 

Caine’s strong supporting cast included several actors with pedigree status in British popular culture. John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, launched the British social realism with his play, Look Back in Anger (1956). Ian Hendry, who was under consideration to play Carter, starred in the first version of The Avengers (1961). Britt Ekland, maybe best known for her active social life, was in The Wicker Man (1973). 

Roy Budd’s soundtrack in jazzy and groovy with occasional Indian tabla percussion, and director Hodges allows some ambient noise, a ship’s horn, wind, to filter into some scenes, adding to the realism.

One moment in Get Carter easily overlooked is one of product placement: a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed album in a scene that also triggers the film’s bloody final act (see below). Released in late 1969, the record – like Carter – feels like it has a lit fuse burning through it, about to blow up what was left of the Swinging Sixties. To echo the final song on the record, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Carter will get what he needs, but ultimately not what he wants. 

Get Carter was released in the U.S. on a double bill with Frank Sinatra’s awful Dirty Dingus Magee. “We were in the toilet in two weeks,” Caine later said, crediting cable TV with introducing Carter to a larger audience. 

If gritty realism, urban settings, a true anti-hero and intricate plotting all count for something, Get Carter owes as much to the British kitchen sink social realism movement as it does film noir, making it the quintessential British crime film. 

As Caine said when marking the 50^th anniversary of Get Carter: “If you’d told me (then) that I’d still be talking about it now, I might not have believed you. Some films are special.”