Seen on the Screen blogathon: The Killers in Hackensack, N.J.

 

The Killers (1946) earned three Oscar nominations, introduced Burt Lancaster and served as Ava Gardner’s career breakout. It may also be the only film noir set mostly in New Jersey, with its pivotal plot point a daring daytime robbery in Hackensack. 

Yup, Hackensack, New Jersey, located some 12 miles west of midtown Manhattan and my hometown. Mostly residential and with a thriving retail scene when I grew up there in the 1960s and 70s, the name Hackensack has a rhyme and rhythm to it, and as such, has lent itself to the lyrics of popular songs for decades, written by the likes of Cole Porter, Steely Dan, Fountains of Wayne and Billy Joel. 

But this is about The Killers. Its one-sentence TV Guide synopsis might read, “A former boxer gets involved with a gangster’s moll.” But there’s much more to it than that. Within the first ten minutes, Lancaster as “the Swede,” is gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why. 

What he discovers is that people were lining up to kill the Swede under the belief that he was aware of the location of a $250,000 payroll stolen years before from the "Prentiss Hat Company", located in Hackensack. 

The film is mostly told through flashbacks as Swede and three others walk through a factory gate wearing faked employee badges before they storm the payroll office and make off with the cash. 

While plenty of pre-war architecture still existed in Hackensack when I lived there, it’s safe to say there was nothing resembling the Prentiss Hat Company. With its arched gated entryway and central road running through the site, if anything it resembles the familiar look of the entrance to a movie studio lot – which it probably was. 

In real life, the only factory in Hackensack that came close to what’s depicted in The Killers was a sprawling throwback, built in 1896, that at its peak employed a few hundred people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, with all the loading dock doors open, we’d ride our bikes past the site and hear the machines punching out soles or stitching. 

After making off with the payroll, the gang meets later at a farmhouse eleven miles away to divide up the loot. There’s some discussion about the “hick roads” they’ll take to get to the place, leading one to think this is a totally rural area. 

Downtown Hackensack, circa 1960s

In 1940, the countryside outside Hackensack was fairly rural; there were scattered farms with apple orchards and small-scale cornfields, but nothing like the desolate farmhouse with its dirt roads pictured in The Killers. Even in the 1940s, the residential boom was beginning to eat up the available farmland. 

In the two brief scenes that take place in Hackensack, handy and somewhat generic buildings stand in for the real thing. Which is fine. Anthony Veiller’s Oscar-nominated screenplay at least treats Hackensack like something other than an old vaudeville joke. (Unlike Superman: The Movie (1978), where Hackensack was ground zero for a nuclear missile launched by Lex Luthor – more of a punchline than a destination). 

It’s probably worth mentioning one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster 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.”

 

Someday We’ll Be Together

Bruce Springsteen’s cover of Someday We’ll Be Together sent me back to Diana Ross & the Supremes’ original, a song that I misread when it came on the radio at the tail end of 1969.

Up to that point, it was difficult to think of the Supremes as “soulful.” Their records were hooky little sugar cookies, but Ross’ vocals often seemed a little too cool, emotionally detached. What grabbed me about Someday We’ll Be Together was that male voice in the background, distant enough that he sounds like he’s standing in a hallway outside the studio, and like something out of a black church sermon with his echoing “say it” and “sing it.”

My misconception was that I always thought it was one of the Temptations; after all, hadn’t the two groups cut an album together with the unwieldy title, Diana Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations?

Turns out the “preacher” is Johnny Bristol, one of the song’s three co-authors. His idea was to sing with Ross to push her a bit and get her into the right mood. When an engineer accidentally recorded Bristol’s words of encouragement, the Motown brass thought it added something and kept it in. Bristol’s coaching seems to have worked as Ross' vocals gets a little more heated as the song goes on.

The record was originally intended to be her first solo single, so neither Mary Wilson or Cindy Birdsong are on it (which might also help account for the song's different feel from what they’d recorded before). One of the background singers is Merry Clayton, a first-call singer when white rockers were looking for a little touch of gospel (see Neil Young’s The Old Laughing Lady, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama and especially the Stones’ Gimme Shelter). And just to stretch these connections even further, Clayton was married to jazz saxophonist Curtis Amy, who played the smoking solo on the fadeout of the Door’s Touch Me.

Ross’ first solo single instead, released in early 1970, was Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand), a song choice more in line with the Las Vegas/Copacabana aspirations Berry Gordy had for her.

Someday We’ll Be Together remains one of the songs from the time period that wasn’t specifically about Vietnam, but could certainly be interpreted that way, along with I Say A Little Prayer, Last Train to Clarksville and Leaving On A Jet Plane. It was also the last number one hit of the 1960s, hitting the top spot on the Billboard chart dated December 27, 1969. For those keeping score, the first #1 single of the decade was Marty Robbins’ El Paso.

 

Favorite TV Show Episode Blogathon: 

I Spy: Home to Judgement 

The Story 

Government agents Kelly Robinson and Alexander Scott are on the run. They’ve botched an assignment, been captured – likely tortured – and escaped. Now they scramble through cornfields and countryside as silent, faceless enemy agents track them. Kelly wears a shackle around one ankle. He’s wounded and feverish. 

They stumble across a farmhouse that Kelly realizes belongs to his Uncle Harry (Will Geer) and Aunt Alta (Una Merkel), whom he hasn’t seen for 27 years. He and Scott hide out in a hayloft. 

Kelly is in bad shape, and as he recites the names of the comic strips he read during his teenage summers on the farm, Scott comes out of hiding and offers to help Uncle Harry with his chores in return for food, which he sneaks back to Kelly. Their trackers, meantime, are closing in. 

Will Geer and Robert Culp

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta realize something is amiss and Kelly is discovered. Uncle Harry, suspicious of these two strangers, tries calling the sheriff, but the telephone is dead. He asks his wife to bring the car around; he’ll drive them to the sheriff himself. Kelly stops his aunt, and a search confirms that the stalkers have wired dynamite to the car’s starter. 

AUNT ALTA: Who are you? What’s your name? 

KELLY: It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t possibly know me. If you remember me at all it would be as a child – who doesn’t exist anymore. (Holding up the dynamite sticks). This is what I am now. And this is what I brought you. 

With the farmhouse now completely cut off, the truth is that the enemies coming after Kelly and Scott will wait until dark, then storm the house and kill everyone. 

Taking inventory of his uncle’s firearms, Kelly asks about a .22 that once belonged to him, and in doing so, reveals himself. 

KELLY: It was mine. But I couldn’t take it back to the city with me and boarding school, so at the end of summer, I left it here, with you. 

UNCLE HARRY: Kelly? Why, it’s Kelly. 

KELLY: You put two nails on the wall in the kitchen. And your 30-30 (Winchester) was on it, for me to take down, when I was tall enough to reach it. The next summer. I would have made it too, because I was tall and skinny the next summer, but that winter my mom died. Next summer never came. And now I’ve come and wished I hadn’t. 

Aunt Alta tears up and Kelly chokes back a sob. His training won’t allow for emotional breakdowns, but what’s implied is that the price for “swingin’ on the Riviera one day,” as Johnny Rivers sang on Secret Agent Man, is emotionally immense. “We’re poison,” Kelly says. “Everything we touch gets contaminated.” 

But it’s getting dark, and this isn’t a time for self-reflection. Working with what’s on hand – two hunting rifles, some barbed wire, homemade explosives in plastic bags, hurricane lamps, fuses for blasting tree stumps and the dynamite sticks taken from the car, Kelly, Scott, Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta prepare to defend themselves. And wait. 

It’s night and the sound of the cicadas give way to footsteps on the roof and in the storm cellar. 

As the intruders try to break into the darkened house, the climax of Home to Judgement is a crescendo of violence and intensity – as much as the networks might allow back then. Electrified barb wire. Explosions. Gunshots. Lit by car headlights or flares. Even the family Dalmatian gets into the action going up against a snarling hound used to hunt down Kelly and Scott.  

Since this is network television, you can guess the outcome. In the final scene, Kelly and Scott walk back to the highway, Kelly holding the rifle his uncle promised him as a teen. He’s smiling for the first time. You can go home again. 

The Script

Robert Culp’s script for Home to Judgement was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing Achievement in a Drama.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Alta are based on Culp’s own grandparents, whose farm was in Idaho. “The story Kelly tells about the two rifles is true,” Culp said. “My children and grandchildren will always have this little magic carpet to take them back to a better time, the way I remember it.”

Synchronicity

Home to Judgement was broadcast as the networks’ fascination with secret agents was running on fumes. One week after it aired on Jan. 8, 1968, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. broadcast its final episode. I Spy survived until April 1968. 

One of the comic strips Kelly remembers in the hayloft is Terry and the Pirates. At the time of his death in 2010, Culp was working on a film adaptation of Terry and the Pirates that he was to direct. It was his favorite boyhood comic strip. 

Straw Dogs

Culp originally wanted Sam Peckinpah to direct Home to Judgement. They had a long relationship working on television projects together. 

One could guess that Peckinpah saw Home to Judgement and may have had it in the back of his mind when he directed Straw Dogs (1971). Both share a common reference point of a violent finale of homemade traps in a darkened house and a hero redeemed. 

You can also draw a straight line from Home to Judgement, through Straw Dogs, to Home Alone (1990). While they take different routes to get there, they share similar final acts, even if the violence in Home Alone is more along the lines of a living Warner Brothers cartoon. A crew member on Home Alone said, “I kept telling people we were doing a kids version of Straw Dogs.”

Only The Strong Survive

Albums of all cover versions can fall into a couple of different areas. Some are contractual obligations. An artist owes the record company an album and what’s easier than recording a bunch of songs you don’t have to labor over writing.

Sometimes they’re pay-it-back tributes to music that influenced an artist, like David Bowie’s Pin-Ups. Or indulgent crate-digging through an artist’s record collection (see Elvis Costello’s Kojak Variety).

Bruce Springsteen’s Only The Strong Survive falls into the former, a heartfelt revisiting of soul and R&B standards and half-remembered songs that once clipped the lower regions of the Top 40. It’s Springsteen’s passion and commitment – his strong and expressive voice – that puts this record over. That and the arrangements, all of which fall close to the originals and feature an army of backup singers, Motown strings, Stax horns.

The song titles give away the ground he’s covering here: When She Was My Girl (Four Tops), I Wish It Would Rain (Temptations), Don’t Play That Song (Aretha), Turn Back the Hands of Time (Tyrone Davis) – heartache and regret were no strangers to soul music. There’s an unexpected cover of the Commodore’s 1985 tribute to the recently departed Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, Nightshift, a song that deals with another kind of loss and a subject that Springsteen seems preoccupied with lately.

Jerry Butler’s 1968 hit Hey Western Union Man is a reminder that once upon a time, songs that referenced telegrams and made use of that dot-dash cadence were big hits, like Western Union by the Five Americans.

Whether purposefully or not (and I tend to think that as with most Springsteen projects, a lot of thought went into the song selection), a few songs fit right into the artist’s persona. The Motown oldie from 1966, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted (Jimmy Ruffin), opens with a line that sure sounds like something Springsteen would have written on one of his better days: “As I walk this land of broken dreams/I have visions of many things/But happiness is just an illusion/Filled with sadness and confusion.”

Someday We’ll Be Together is not just a cover of the underrated Supremes hit from late 1969, but a title he used for a song intended for Darkness on the Edge of Town that didn’t make the final cut.

The Four Tops’ version of 7 Rooms of Gloom always felt chaotic and unpleasant. You can make out the lyrics in Springsteen’s version better and it takes on the life of the midnight ranting of a man whose wife has left him. He can’t sleep and as he roams his house in the dark, bumping into the furniture, it recalls Springsteen’s own line from Adam Raised A Cain about walking “these empty rooms looking for something to blame.”

If I have a single complaint, it’s the album cover. Hey Bruce, it’s okay to smile occasionally. And stop posing in front of cars. Brian Wilson hasn’t been photographed with a surfboard since the Kennedy administration.

Bruce has taken many paths over the course of his long career. Sometimes, there are detours that leave me cold, but this album is not one of them.

 

My All-Time Greatest Albums, part two

With the understanding that the music you love when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, I came up with a truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

In the days before albums became Artistic Statements, the Ventures were knocking out one record after another, all of which could be filed under the heading “teenage dance party music.” Between 1962 and 1967, they released 22 albums of instrumental rock, 13 of which reached the top 40. Their most successful single during this time, Walk Don’t Run ’64, went to #8. 

The kids in my neighborhood lined up to buy the latest Ventures’ release and for decades, thumbing through someone’s record collection or a box of albums in a garage sale or a flea market, you were always bound to come across, usually looking worse for the wear, at least one Ventures album. 

My initiation was Christmas 1965 when I found Ventures A Go-Go under the tree. Ventures’ albums were as predictable as mail delivery, and Ventures A Go-Go met the same criteria as all other Ventures albums. A quick listen? Both sides of the record, taken together, clocked in at under 30 minutes. Recent Top 40 covers? Satisfaction; Louie, Louie; The In Crowd; Wooly Bully; I Like It Like That. A bunch of original songs cooked up by the band in the studio, with interrelated titles? They’re listed right there on the back of the record: Go-Go Slow, A Go-Go Guitar, A Go-Go Dancer. Special guitar effects? Some fuzz tone here and there, certainly on Satisfaction. A pretty girl on the album cover? She’s in blurry motion, but it still counts. 

I was only ten-years old, but I figured I had the soundtrack for my first teenage dance party. All I needed was a few more years and have, like Sam Cooke sang in Having A Party, “Cokes are in the icebox/Popcorn's on the table.” Instead, my parents held what used to be referred to as an “open house” that New Year’s Day, with other couples and family. I played Ventures A Go-Go on their stereo as background party music. Nobody got up to dance. 

I really scratched my Ventures itch in the 80s and 90s, picking up a bunch of their records at several of the aforementioned flea markets. Their Christmas album, which came out two months after Ventures A Go-Go, still gets played every holiday season. The first one was still the best.

 

My All-Time Greatest Albums, part one 

When music publications tossed out their All-Time Greatest Albums lists, it was a fun read and a good timewaster, the top of the list heavily weighted with the usual suspects of classic rock legend and radio playlists: Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, along with the obligatory, sometimes begrudging nods to black music (Marvin Gaye, Sly), punk (Clash, Sex Pistols) and grunge (Nirvana). 

Often, before drifting off at night, I’ll draw up my own list of greatest albums and it’s utter predictability is boring enough to put me right to sleep: “Okay, tonight #1 goes to Pet Sounds and we’ll drop Revolver to #2, something from Neil Young should be at #3 … and … and … zzzzzz.” 

With the understanding that the music you love when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, I came up with a truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list. 

Remember How Great, Volume 1 and 2

These were my mother’s records, issued in 1961 and 1962. If you’re familiar with the Now That’s What I Call Music series (the McDonald’s hamburgers of music with billions sold), its roots, and that of all compilation albums, start here. 

Available at the time for $1, plus 10 Lucky Strike cigarette packs (not to mention countless trips to the doctor, the hospital and finally hospice), this commercial for the records clocks in at 1:26, practically the equivalent of a half-hour long infomercial by 1961 standards. 

What worked best for the albums was the range of music, from vanilla pop standards to soundtracks for a drive through Harlem. Nearly everything on the two volumes is from the 1940s and 50s, although this version of St. Louis Blues by Louis Armstrong on Volume 2 was recorded in 1929. It has an intensity that totally changed my mindset of Armstrong as that harmless guy with the trumpet and the handkerchief on Ed Sullivan. In my late teens I played this over and over. 

What else was on Remember How Great? Tequila by the Champs, Jumpin’ Jive by Cab Calloway, The Tennessee Waltz by Patti Page, a slice of Wonder Bread that I inexplicably liked -- and that I later realized was the inspiration behind Neil Young's underrated The Old Country Waltz.

When my mother moved, the records disappeared before I could make off with them, but they’re all over eBay, leading me to think that this series was a fairly big seller. I’m also sure that if everybody owned a stereo like the one belonging to my parents, with its needle resembling a roofing nail, they all survive with plenty of pops and crackles.

More to come.

The Perfect Day: February 1, 1964 

In this exercise, we go back in time, and using an old issue of TV Guide as our map, navigate our way through 24 hours of New York City television. 

Clowny and Claude

February 1, 1964 is a Saturday, so the morning is taken up by cartoons, ancient reruns and that perennial 7:00 a.m. favorite, Modern Farmer. At 9:00 we find an hour of cartoons on WOR Channel 9 hosted by Claude Kirchner. I don’t recall if this was a daytime version of Kirchner’s early evening show Terrytoon Circus, which used to open with his puppet sidekick Clowny bursting through a paper-covered hoop and ended with Clowny telling us kids that it was time for bed – at 7:30? Even as a child I scoffed at Clowny’s brazenness! 

At 1:00, it’s American Bandstand under whose listing TV Guide tells us, “Next week Bandstand moves to the West Coast,” casually downplaying another crack in an ongoing seismic shift, the ending of the East Coast’s television dominance. American Bandstand had been based in Philadelphia since 1956, where it aired live each weekday and established itself as television’s #1 teen hangout, many of its regular high school-age dancers popular enough with viewers to receive more than 500 fan letters a week. In 1963, the show cut back to Saturday afternoon and Dick Clark, with an eye toward revving up his own career, then took the show to Los Angeles where it ran until 1989 as Clark tried his luck acting before building his empire of game shows, specials and “rockin’” New Year’s Eve broadcasts. 

But maybe Clark outsmarted everyone but himself. Consider this. The Beatles landed in America that Friday, Feb. 7 to play the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday. Two days later they traveled by train to Washington, D.C. and gave a concert at the Washington Coliseum. Imagine if Bandstand was still in Philadelphia and Clark convinced Brian Epstein to stop in Philadelphia for a taped interview and maybe a song or two. Epstein would have understood that Bandstand was a perfect venue and that Clark would be much more simpatico with the band than the New York press, who seemed more concerned with questions about their hair. It could have been a landmark moment in Beatlemania and rewarded Clark with a much hipper legacy. 

At 2:00 we switch over to college basketball on NBC Channel 4, Princeton vs. Penn, to watch Bill Bradley, a superhuman sophomore averaging 30 points a game for Princeton. Remarkably, this is the only college basketball game broadcast on this day. Today, on an average Saturday there can be up to twenty college games available to view from noon to midnight even if you only have basic cable. 

After the game we have our choice of a special, New Jersey School Budget, or the last 30 minutes of a roller derby match between the San Francisco Bay Bombers and the New York Chiefs on Channel 11. Guess what we’ll choose? 

Late afternoon brings with it Jungle Jim on WNEW Channel 5, followed by Sandy Becker. At 6:30 it’s Clay Cole’s teen party on WPIX Channel 11, where the guests are the unlikely Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows – unlikely given Steverino’s long-standing condescension toward teenage pop music. 

Our choice at 7:30 is between the Jackie Gleason Show and Hootenanny. Not unlike Dick Clark, Gleason is also seeking greener pastures – or in his case greener putting greens – and will move his show from New York to Miami, where it will start airing in September. Hootenanny was a variety show cashing in on a campus folk music craze fueled by acts like Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Kingston Trio. Unbeknownst to Hootenanny’s producers, it – and traditional folk music’s popularity among the young – has about one week left before Paul McCartney kicks off All My Loving on national TV the following weekend. Hootenanny gets cancelled in June, replaced by Shindig. We’re choosing Gleason here, if only to see Frank Fontaine’s “is he supposed to be drunk or just really slow” Crazy Guggenheim routine. 

Between 8:30 to 9:30 we drop in on a couple of movies already in progress, Son of Sampson on Channel 9 and The Monster From the Ocean Floor on Channel 11. At 9:30 we switch over to Hollywood Palace on Channel 7, with its uninspiring lineup of host Donald O’Connor, Buddy Greco and Buddy Hackett “doing his Chinese waiter monolog” according to TV Guide. You know, when he wraps a rubber band around his head to make his eyes look “Asian” and transposes his “R’s” and “L’s” as in “flied lice.” It manages to be both offensive and unfunny. 

Hollywood Palace never had the panache, the feeling of Broadway sophistication or the caliber of guests that Ed Sullivan pulled. Too often it featured performers whose best days were behind them, out-of-work actors and animal acts. After Sullivan introduced the Beatles, then had them back three times this month, Hollywood Palace staggered about with guests like Van Johnson, Betty Hutton and Gloria Swanson. It took until late April for the Palace to book its first British Invasion act, second-stringers Chad & Jeremy, and finally got up to speed that summer by having the Rolling Stones on, only to have them mocked on-camera by host Dean Martin, who was clearly in an “I’m a bigger star than these creeps’ll ever be and I don’t give a shit what I say about them” mood. 

At 10:30 we watch a rerun of Car 54, Where Are You, before moving on to the news. Les Crane comes on at 1:15 a.m., interviewing New York Congressman John Lindsey, who is on his way to running for mayor of New York City and, with his youthfully handsome looks, possibly filling some spot in the public’s heart and mind left vacant only three months earlier by JFK’s death. 

The old guard is clearly beginning to fade and give way to the new -- Lindsey, Lennon and McCartney, Los Angeles. But at this point we’re just content to stare at the screen while the Late Movie, followed by the Late Late Movie, flicker by.