Burt and Ava visit Hackensack

The 1946 film The Killers is best known today as the movie that launched the careers of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. We can also definitively say it’s the only film noir set in New Jersey, mostly played out in the fictional town of Brentwood and the very real Hackensack. 

In the first ten minutes, Lancaster, as “the Swede,” gets gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (played by the underrated Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why (back in the days when crime movies often substituted insurance investigators for detectives – O’Brien’s character even packs a gun in a shoulder holster).

O’Brien works for “Atlantic Casualty” and when he calls in to the home office from a pay phone, he asks the operator for a number in Newark. He later references Prudential as a company that might want his services if his boss won’t let him pursue the Swede case and later orders an assistant to pass on information to a reporter from “the Ledger.”

People are after the Swede because they believe he has the $250,000 stolen years ago in a payroll robbery at the Prentiss Hat Company in Hackensack. In a flashback, we see Lancaster and three other gang members lined up at the factory gate wearing faked employee badges – and because it’s 1946, they fit right in with the other employees, all white and all male. 

Like most film noirs (films noir?), the plot gets a little twisty, but a telegram to O’Brien from “Hackensack Fire Department Chief Kenney” marks a turning point in solving the case. 

The Prentiss Hat Company of Hackensack was strictly made up, but it had a real-life parallel in S. Goldberg’s Slipper Factory, built in 1896, and located on River Street behind the county courthouse and jail, once employed more than 600 people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, all the loading dock doors were open, and you’d see (and hear) the machines punching out soles or stitching.

(And I know from bike rides past the plant and office supply deliveries I made in the seventies, that unlike the Prentiss Hat Company, Goldberg’s employees were mostly women and Hispanic).

An uncle liked to tell me that if I didn’t start concentrating on my grades, I’d be attending Goldberg’s Slipper College after high school. Big joke, although there were probably worse places I could have wound up. The factory was torn down in 2008, but today it’s known as SG Companies, a multi-national footwear and apparel corporation with factories and warehouses around the U.S. and Asia.

Here’s one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster plays a man with a fragile grasp on reality stranded in the suburbs. He looks up at the blue summer sky and marvels, “It’s beautiful, as if we’re on the bow of a ship – Lisbon, Naples, Istanbul,” to which a neighbor flatly adds, “Hackensack.”

Getting MAD

When the playground bully in the Oval Office recently called Pete Buttigieg, “Alfred E. Neuman,” it sent Buttigieg scrambling to Google. “I’d never heard of him,” the 37-year old admitted. “It must be a generational thing.”

For even a dope like the president, whose reading was likely limited to Playboy and Penthouse (and then only for the pictures) to know who Alfred E. was, speaks to MAD’s pervasiveness in society over the decades.

Like reading The Catcher in the Rye or listening to punk rock, you had to be the right age to discover MAD. Written and drawn by the “usual gang of idiots” as they described themselves, the staff was made up of primarily New York, liberal-minded Jewish guys who helped generations question not only authority, but popular culture, politics, society and (especially) Madison Avenue.

MAD’s worldview was progressive and bipartisan. Corporations were mostly evil. Cigarette advertising was worse. Most TV shows were idiotic. Politicians were not to be trusted. Parents were loving, but often clueless. MAD never spoke down to its readers. While I had the impression that its staff, all children of the fifties (and forties), never got the Beatles, when it came time to parody them, Ringo was the obvious target in this gentle, gender-bending Breck girl ad:

From the days when MAD was still a comic book and not a magazine, it published one its sharpest satires, Mickey Rodent, which had Mickey, jealous that Darnold Duck was stealing the limelight, selling out his feathered pal to a zoo; all the characters questioning why they always wore gloves, and Pluto holding signs asking why, of all the animals in Dizzy Land, he was “chosen to remain mute.” Talk about questioning authority. And still funny.

New issues of MAD will disappear from newsstands before the end of the year. I pretty much stopped reading the magazine in the mid-Seventies when it was parodying TV shows I’d never seen and ads for products I wasn’t familiar with. It was time for younger kids to move up to MAD and for me to step away. National Lampoon was there to fill the void, followed by Saturday Night Live and, much later, Spy magazine and The Onion.

Twenty years ago, I tried to re-read Catcher in the Rye. It wasn’t working for me like it did when I was 13. I put the book down and gave it to my son. We all move on, which is just another way of saying, What, me worry?

A step too far

When they came for Kate Smith, there was no one left to answer for her. 

Well, not exactly. There was a niece who said Aunt Kathryn didn’t have a prejudiced bone in her body. 

Based on an anonymous tip, the Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banned Kate Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” after two songs she recorded in the Thirties that reference “darkies’ and “pickaninnies” were uncovered.

The Yankees, a team that dragged its feet when it came to integrating their roster (it didn’t happen until 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson) had taken to playing Smith’s recording during the seventh inning stretch as a jingoistic rejoinder to 9/11.

The Flyers’ connection went deeper. The team believed playing her recording before key games was good luck. When the Flyers made their Stanley Cup runs 40 years ago, they brought Smith to the Spectrum to sing it live. After many years of watching her star fade, it must have felt like personal redemption to put on a glittery gown, follow the red carpet out to mid-ice and belt out God Bless America. Relevant again. The Flyers erected a statue of Smith outside the arena to show their gratitude. When they banned the song, they took the statue down. 

It’s more sad than anything, a knee-jerk cynical reaction made by marketing executives who fear perception is reality and the possibility of losing a ticket sale or two (and I don’t think I’m exaggerating about how many people might stay away if the teams continued to play the recording). 

But what happens in 80 years when someone blows the dust off Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”? With no understanding of context or point-of-view, but only hearing the n-word dropped countless times, do they push the Motion Picture Academy to take away his Best Song Oscar?

Or Bing Crosby’s blackface number in Holiday Inn. Does his “White Christmas” start falling off  of holiday playlists?

A wild-eyed Ralph Kramden threatening to send Alice “to the moon”? Maybe one day gone forever to the same purgatory where Amos and Andy, Vaughan Meader and Foster Brooks’ “drunk guy” were recently joined by Kate Smith.  

White Heat

White Heat lives up to its reputation as possibly the best gangster movie Hollywood made. Aside from its “Made it Ma, top of the world!” fireball ending, there’s James Cagney as Cody Jarrett, an unhinged killer with Oedipal urges strong enough that his mother is a member of his gang (TCM showed the movie on Mother’s Day).  

Cody Jarrett makes people uncomfortable. His gang members, fellow inmates, girlfriend (everybody but Ma) are clearly on edge when Jarrett is around. He has a temper that flares up quickly and without warning. He kills without hesitation. Jarrett talks to his Ma after she’s dead (another gang member, sick of her domineering, shoots her in the back while Cody is jail). He doubts his own sanity as he dwells on his father, who died “in the nuthouse.”

By the time he reaches the end of the line, cackling while the flames from a burning chemical tank explode around him, Jarrett has pretty much lost it.

Cagney’s Jarret reminds me of Heath Ledger as the Joker. While the Joker is on a whole other plane of unreality, they are both unrepentant killers, unpredictable and just scary to be around. Cody, when he starts to get angry, shows a weird, lipless sneer reminiscent of the Joker’s own mutilated mouth.

One other thing that sets White Heat apart is its presentation of what may be a reasonably realistic portrayal of what it’s like to live outside the law. I’ve read a couple of novels in the Parker series by Richard Stark. Parker (he doesn’t seem to have a first name) supports his modest lifestyle by committing major heists. When his share of the take starts to dwindle past a certain point, he begins looking for his next payday.  

Just a few pages of the Parker books are about the actual crime. Mostly, they cover the planning and strategizing of the heist, and its aftermath, hiding out, sometimes for weeks, in shabby motels and abandoned houses.

White Heat similarly doesn’t romanticize outlaws. After Jarrett’s gang hijacks a “treasury train,” they hide out in a vacant house, wearing overcoats indoors (Cody won’t allow them to turn up the heat, lest the outside world notices smoke rising from the chimney), before moving on to cheap roadside bungalows. No penthouse apartments. No fur coats.

The other Parker touch in White Heat is the character called “The Trader,” a guy who stays mostly underground and serves as Cody’s financier/“business development” agent. The Trader meets Cody in yet another abandoned house (this time out in the country) to present him with the plans and financing to pull off a payroll robbery at a chemical plant. In the Parker books, there’s usually someone who recruits the gang, then lays out the money for guns, ammo and vehicles in return for a (usually major) cut of the take.

Hollywood gangster movies had pretty much run their course when White Heat came out in 1949. This late, last gasp left the genre on top of the world.

The beat goes on

One of the elements that propelled Simon & Garfunkel’s records, especially in their later years, was the percussion that gave punch and punctuation to Paul Simon’s sometimes bookish lyrics.

There was the groovy go-go beat on Hazy Shade of Winter, a song that referenced “manuscripts of unpublished rhyme” that you could dance to. The rolling thunder in America. The freak-out percussion at the end of Fakin’ It. The drum rolls that clear the way for the chorus in The Only Living Boy In New York. The cannon shots in The Boxer, like knockout blows. And in Bridge Over Troubled Water, the crescendo of cymbals and drums that give way to that faraway, submerged beat that starts with the “sail on, silver girl” lyric.

All of it was the work of session drummer Hal Blaine, who died this week. It’s not a reach to say Blaine sits at one of the four spots on the mythical Mount Rushmore of rock musicians. He played on more than 150 songs that reached the top ten. His log of session work makes for a playlist long enough for a car trip from New Jersey to Maine. Good Vibrations. These Boots Are Made for Walkin’. The drumroll that kicks in just before the chorus sings “Batman” on TV. The blues rock beat on Sinatra’s That’s Life. California Girls. Mr. Tambourine Man. Eve of Destruction.

Dennis Wilson became the Beach Boys’ drummer because he was Brian’s kid brother. Mike Clark had a cool haircut and that landed him the drumming gig with the Byrds. Live, their inability to keep time didn’t matter – they could barely be heard over the screams. For recording, Hal Blaine got the call.

Blaine is responsible for the boom-ba-boom bang, boom-ba-boom bang that kicks off Be My Baby, maybe rock’s most iconic drumbeat. He found the Bridge Over Troubled Water drum sound by placing tire chains over the snare drum and hitting them. On A Taste of Honey, he contributed the boom-boom-boom-boom bass drum bridge. (And probably deserved a co-author credit).

Blaine played on MacArthur Park. I Got You Babe. Wichita Lineman. Nearly all of Phil Spector’s hits. Close to You. Let’s Live For Today. Wouldn’t It Be Nice. Windy. It’s Over. Monday, Monday. Up, Up And Away. It’s a jukebox for all eternity.

So long, OBJ

When JFK died, there was a list that got passed around offering comparisons between the deaths of Kennedy and Lincoln – their last names were both seven letters long, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth’s names had 15 letters, Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre, then fled to a warehouse; Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theatre. It was a long list; I can only remember some of it.

As a kid, reading the list brought some sense to a senseless act, put it into a kind of historical context and made me feel like maybe Kennedy’s death was, in some way, fated.

Forty-nine years ago, the Giants traded a record-breaking wide receiver, known for his blazing speed and swagger, to the Cleveland Browns for three players. And today, in trying to make sense of the Odell Beckham trade, I’m relating back to its similarities to the Giants dealing Homer Jones to Cleveland in 1970.

It killed me to see Homer leave New York, but even as a dopey teenager I realized its inevitability. The Giants needed a lot of help and trading their best player, and getting three players in return, was a quick way to start stocking the shelves. It didn’t hurt that one of the guys we got from Cleveland was Ron Johnson, whose star would quickly eclipse that of Jones.

The Giants of 2019 are now officially in full tear-down mode. They received two high draft picks and a promising player in return for Beckham (see, like the Jones trade, three players for one) so there’s a start. I hope like hell the Giants’ front office has a plan.

There were times when you were just dazzled by Beckham’s speed, his moves, his hands. And there were times when he could be a total embarrassment, like choosing the weekend when players were protesting police violence to mime peeing like a dog in the end zone after a touchdown.

Sometimes historical events repeat themselves, and sometimes their outcomes do as well. And for the record, there are 12 letters in Odell Beckham’s name and ten for Homer Jones.