But these people are bored, alas. They are bored because they are romantic heroes who work for the CIA or the international heroin trade, and the ordinary stuff of life is too goddamn dreary for them. They would not know how to operate an alarm clock if you gave them one, but they can defuse bombs and drive speedboats. And they devote their lives to doing things in illogical ways. If something has always been done one way, and not another, they will find a new way to do it no matter what the cost or inconvenience.
Take heroin smuggling, for example. They would never dream of flying it in from Mexico or hiding it in a Lincoln Continental as was done in The French Connection. No, that would be too mundane. They must infiltrate a 150-year-old family importing business in Amsterdam and set up a complicated system of helicopter drops, midnight boat rides, hollow dolls, trick grandfather clocks, and phony Bibles.
Why go to all this trouble? For example, there is the problem of getting the heroin out of the warehouse and into the castle where it will be stuffed into the dolls and grandfather clocks. How do they do this? They take the insides out of the Bibles, fill them with heroin, and give the Bibles to phony nuns who carry them to the chapel in the castle, where they trade them for real Bibles. Yes, it’s as simple as that. And so subtle, too, that it takes a trained CIA operative like Barbara Parkins to realize that the nuns are wearing diamond rings on their fingers and high-heel shoes and mesh stockings.
All of this reminded me of the final chapters of Huckleberry Finn, where Jim is locked in the smokehouse and Huck and Tom want to get him out. You remember. Jim and Huck think the perfectly obvious way to pull off the job is to dig a hole under the smokehouse and let Jim crawl out. Elementary. Too elementary for Tom Sawyer. He wants Jim to play an escaping prisoner role right out of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. He has to tame spiders and make them his pets, and scratch messages on tin plates and throw them outside, and write his name in blood on the wall, and on the day of the escape he has to chain his own leg to his bed. Why? So they can saw it off in order to free him, of course.
Some days it is just easier not to escape. That was the feeling I had about the Amsterdam heroin-smuggling outfit. They put themselves to so much trouble that with just a little more effort they could have made as much money running a franchised chicken operation. When they kill a person, for example, they paint up a doll so it looks like the person and then they hang the person and the doll next to each other.
Dying is very important in the world inside Alistair MacLean’s head, you see. A man must die with style or he is not a man—not a stylish man, anyway. Nobody dies in bed except, of course, under unspeakable circumstances. Nobody is shot if he can be garroted, garroted if he can be run down by a speedboat, or ran down by a speedboat if he can be double-crossed by a twenty-two-year-old girl pretending to be a mentally retarded heroin victim with the IQ of a child. You see how it works. These thoughts and others crossed my mind as I was watching Puppet on a Chain.
Radio Flyer
(Directed by Richard Donner; starring Lorraine Bracco, John Heard; 1992)
Radio Flyer pushes so many buttons that I wanted to start pushing back. One of the things I resisted was the movie’s almost doglike desire to please. It seems to be asking, how can anyone dislike a movie that is against child abuse, and believes little red wagons can fly? I found it fairly easy. The movie pushes so many fundamental questions under the rug of its convenient screenplay that the happy ending seems like cheating, if not like fraud.
Radio Flyer begins with the compulsion, common to so much children’s literature and film, to place its little heroes in a cruel and heartless world. Like all those cartoon characters who lose their parents, are kidnapped, or have their homes burned down or their families lost at sea, this one begins on a sad note, with a divorce. The central characters, Mike and Bobby, are then taken by their mother to California, where she marries a sadistic, drunken bully who wants to be called The King. When mom isn’t around, The King likes to beat little Bobby, who gets black-and-blue welts as a result.
The mother (Lorraine Bracco) is a strange case, an engaging, intelligent, hardworking woman who somehow fails to notice that she is married to a monster. She also misses the welts on Bobby’s back, and of course her kids, feeling untrusted and abandoned, do not tell her about the beatings. Instead, they begin to plan an escape for little Bobby by outfitting his Radio Flyer wagon with wings and an engine, so it will fly, and he can leave town and never come back.
They have some reason to think this plan will work. A kid named Fisher once coasted his wagon down a hill and up the slope of a barn, and he flew through the sky so high he was almost able to hitch a ride on the tail of a plane that was taking off from the valley. Of course, Fisher also suffered a terrible fall, and when we finally meet him, late in the picture, he is crippled, but there you have it: Heroes have to take chances.
I will not regale you with the details by which Bobby’s maiden flight takes place. I was so appalled, watching this kid hurtling down the hill in his pathetic contraption, that I didn’t know which ending would be worse. If he fell to his death, that would be unthinkable, but if he soared up to the moon, it would be unforgivable—because you can’t escape from child abuse in little red wagons, and even the people who made this picture should have been ashamed to suggest otherwise.
Who was this movie made for? Kids? Adults? What kid needs a movie about a frightened little boy who is at the mercy of drunken beatings? What adult can suspend so much disbelief that the movie’s ending, a visual rip-off from E.T., inspires anything other than incredulity? What hypothetical viewer could they possibly have had in mind?
Radio Flyer was a famous screenplay by David Mickey Evans before it was a movie. It was one of the hottest screenplays in town, maybe because of the incongruity of its elements. If somebody at a story conference didn’t describe this movie as “child abuse meets Peter Pan,” they were missing a bet. It is utterly cynical from beginning to end, and never more cynical than in its contrived idealism. Was the screenplay so sought-after, so expensive, that no sane voice was heard, raising fundamental objections? Hollywood fought tooth and nail to spend a fortune on this screenplay. Was the movie launched in some kind of mass hysteria?
I know that the voice-over narration suggests that maybe this wasn’t the way the story really happened, and is only the way Mike, the older brother, now remembers it as an adult. Okay, but then what did really happen? Did Bobby fall to his death? Did the cops haul away The King? Did mom wise up? Radio Flyer is a real squirmarama of unasked and unanswered questions. At the end, there’s an 800 number you can call if you want information on child abuse. I imagine the volunteers at the other end would have some pithy observations about this movie.
Rapa Nui
(Directed by Kevin Reynolds; starring Jason Scott Lee, Sandrine Holt; 1994)
Rapa Nui slips through the National Geographic Loophole. This is the Hollywood convention that teaches us that brown breasts are not as sinful as white ones, and so while it may be evil to gaze upon a blonde Playboy centerfold and feel lust in our hearts, it is educational to watch Polynesian maidens frolicking topless in the surf. This isn’t sex; it’s geography.