Incongruous Encounter: Frank Sinatra Meets Randy Newman

There have been some naturally skeptical reactions to the notion of Bob Dylan doing a cover album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. With a voice that is more a rough in the diamond than the reverse, his about to be released Shadows in the Night stands to prove an interesting challenge that hopefully will yield better results than his crooning of Christmas carols a few years back. But Shadows in the Night got me thinking about another incongruous encounter between Sinatra and another unlikely performer long before he died.

I think it's safe to assume that when Frank Sinatra created Reprise Records in 1960, he didn't envision a line-up that would eventually include Tiny Tim, Jimi Hendrix, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Neil Young, The Fugs and Randy Newman. However, by 1970, there they were, not to mention a host of others just like them – and here was Frank Sinatra situated among them. Curiously, at the time, Sinatra was also in need of a hit song. So he turned to an unlikely collaborator from his label: Randy Newman.

Frank Sinatra has been a best-selling artist for Capitol Records since 1953 after a long string of sensational albums. Sinatra possessed the kind of dreamy, forlorn voice that could reach down to the very essence of tenderness in a sad song. When he interpreted such indelibly sorrowful tunes as "I Can't Get Started," on No One Cares (1959), or "Willow Weep for Me," on Frank Sinatra Sings Only for the Lonely (1958), he would embody the song's anguish so effortlessly it was if the compositions were singing him. Sinatra had perfected a distinctly romantic style, a sexiness born of both heartbreak and despair. He played out the role of the lonely guy at the bar, nursing his glass of scotch, then imparting a lasting story of regret to you alone. In doing so, Sinatra could keep alive a slight flicker of romantic desire, hushed yearning or grievous moment that became more deeply intoxicating with every line he sang.

Sinatra’s Sinatra

Sinatra: All or Nothing at All aired on HBO in April. (Photo by William Gottlieb, 1947)

For those of us who adore Frank Sinatra, Alex Gibney’s comprehensive two-part documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, which aired on HBO earlier this year, is a gift. I watched it in a kind of rapture, held by the dense, varied narrative and the amazing footage (much of it rare) and the intelligence of both the analysts and the interviewees from different stages in Sinatra’s life and career. Most of all, though, I was held by Sinatra himself, not just the singer and the personality but the chronicler of his own story. A few seasons back, an otherwise misguided Broadway revue of Stephen Sondheim’s music called Sondheim on Sondheim intercut footage of interviews with the composer-lyricist from different decades, and the results were unexpectedly moving: while he aged, his lucid and insightful glimpses into his own thoughts about his work provided a continuum for it. Relying on a number of interviews given at different phases of Sinatra’s career, Gibney does something similar, and when he adds commentary by his children, Nancy and Tina and Frank Jr. (whose vocal patterns are oddly similar to those of the comedian Paul Reiser), and the words of his wives Nancy Sinatra and Ava Gardner, read by Christine Baranski and Gina Gershon respectively, the effect is not unlike that of a bank of mirrors with planes that reach inward for as far as the eye can see.

The Frank: Seth MacFarlane's Music is Better Than Words

At Capitol Records, the Neumann U47 microphone is known as "The Frank" because it was used to record the voice of Frank Sinatra during the 1950s. For Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy and an out-of-the-closet crooner, "The Frank" symbolizes the passion he feels for the music of an era that featured the kind of orchestral arrangements that put Sinatra on the musical map.

Music Is Better Than Words (Universal Republic, 2011) is Seth MacFarlane's auspicious debut on CD. The album is a throwback to a time when vocalists literally sang with the orchestra in the same studio. Sinatra's Capitol recordings in particular captured an emotional dynamic that distinguished them from just about everything else in music. This was partly due to their technical achievements. But it was also due to the arrangements and the close proximity of the vocalist with the band. MacFarlane's record is not a tribute per se, but an attempt to capture the sound and energy of Sinatra's recordings. That's a worthy goal, but it's only as valuable as the music we hear. On Music Is Better Than Words, we hear it.

Lady Blue: What Happened, Miss Simone?

There's no question that it's been a pretty good period for music documentaries. Just when you thought that they were becoming more often than not tributes in granite, featuring little about the music and more about the artist's tenacity in surviving substance abuse and failure, a number of pictures have come along lately with real temperament and a sharp critical perspective on the work. Early on in the year, there was the engaging and informative The Wrecking Crew which may not have been strikingly innovative in its technique, but was touching in its generosity towards a group of musicians who had never really been publicly recognized before. Alex Gibney, who had already parted the curtain on the sinister machinations behind the Church of Scientology in his compelling and absorbing Going Clear, came up with two radically different musical portraits of James Brown (Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown) and Frank Sinatra (Sinatra: All or Nothing at All). In Mr. Dynamite, Gibney captured not only the thrilling showmanship in James Brown's music and the vibrant electricity of his live concerts, but in speaking to his band, the JB's, he was also able to plumb the strains and fragile bonds within the comradeship that fueled his meteoric rise to fame. By going to the roots of Brown's version of soul music, which combined funk with the ecstatic heights reached in the churches of black gospel, Gibney also made sense of Brown's complex connection to the black community. (Although he was a spiritual Godfather to dispossessed blacks, who felt even more disenfranchised after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he was also a self-made entrepreneur and an exponent of black capitalism that would lead him to later support Richard Nixon.)

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XV

In the recent issue of Pitchfork, Dhani Harrison describes a conversation he had with his late father about his guitar playing. “My father once said to me, ‘I play the notes you never hear,’” he remembers. “He focused on touch and control partly because he never thought he was any good, really. He knew he was good at smaller things: not hitting any off notes, not making strings buzz, not playing anything that would jar you. ‘Everyone else has played all the other bullshit,’ he would say. ‘I just play what's left.’”

I started to think about what song might illustrate best for me the notion of playing 'what's left.' On Beatles for Sale (or Beatles VI – if you grew up like me in North America), "What You're Doing" has a solo that's quite economical in that George Harrison style. The notes he plays (over-top George Martin's rumbling piano) are picked at with a brightness that gives the song some of its shimmering texture. Yet it still harmonizes with the song's melodic line even when it briefly breaks free from it. Heard here best in mono, rather than stereo, the pieces are always designed to fit the whole.

Fearless Satire: The Criterion Blu-ray Release of The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

(Spoiler alert: This article discusses plot details that The Manchurian Candidate keeps hidden until quite late in the narrative. Though they are quite famous, if you don’t know them you might prefer to see the movie first and encounter the revelations with all the suspense and surprise that the 1962 audience would have experienced.)

Political conspiracy thrillers flourished during the early days of the Cold War and especially during the Korean War. Generally their heroes were pure-hearted Federal agents who succeeded in stemming the insidious behavior of Communist infiltrators, icy devils with no more dimensions than the Nazis bad guys Hollywood had featured just a few years earlier. The exception was Leo McCarey’s notorious and distasteful 1952 My Son John, in which the Commie is a young American man (Robert Walker) who comes home to give the commencement speech at his old high school and alarms his mother (Helen Hayes) by mocking his parents’ patriotism and refusing to attend church with them. He is also clearly gay, though the movie doesn’t say so explicitly; you deduce it from the flourishes in Walker’s performance, which are recycled from the truly splendid one he gave the year before in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. The idea seems to be some debased version of the Renaissance notion about the clustering of vices in a corrupted personality. In the great Jacobean tragedy The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, when the husband of the protagonist realizes she’s a murderess and her partner in crime calls her a whore, the husband replies, “It could not choose but follow.” More specifically in My Son John, the un-American elements in John’s behavior – cynicism, atheism, homosexuality – all point to his being under the influence of a foreign power.

Remembering Harlan Ellison: What He Meant to Me

Author Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writer Harlan Ellison, who passed away at 84, either on June 27 or June 28 – reports differ – reportedly in his sleep. That means he died on my 59th birthday or shortly thereafter, thus allowing me to mark a milestone of another sort, a recognition that his presence, as a cultural and personal influence, has been with me for more than 40 years, my having discovered him at age 15 or 16, when I was still in high school. That’s longer than most of my friendships. (The only other writer I’ve read as deeply is Stephen King but it’s not the same type of relationship.) I am not sure exactly when I discovered him or which books of his I read first – though many of my copies of Ellison were the Pyramid editions with the artsy covers and his name in big bold letters at the top – but I know as soon as I did cotton onto Harlan Ellison, I almost became fixated on him. I picked up his collections, of course, but pretty much bought any magazine that featured his name on it or anthologies to which he contributed. I also tried to catch him on TV, NBC’s Tomorrow (with Tom Snyder) and CBC’s 90 Minutes Live in those days, ABC's Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher later on, where he was scintillating, and I still recall how excited I was when CBC’s flagship radio show As It Happens chose to interview Ellison when Ronald Reagan was elected U.S. president in 1980. Harlan wasn’t too happy about that event, as you can imagine, notably having been on the wrong side of the president when he was governor of California and put Ellison on his enemies’ list. Hell, I even joined Harlan Ellison’s fan club, which sent out neat booklets, extolling his latest projects and the like, and which I still possess. I’ve never done that for anyone before or since.

I remember my first interview with the man (three in all) when I was in university, for The Loyola News at Concordia University, and being so intimidated by his voice (and reputation) on the other end of the telephone line that I only took five of my allotted ten interview minutes. (The ensuing interviews were for The Montreal Suburban weekly community newspaper and the Toronto-based daily paper The Financial Post, now The National Post.) Once I got involved with Critics at Large, as co-founder of this nearly ten-year-old daily website, I penned three more pieces on Ellison, beginning with a very long one encapsulating everything I knew and wanted readers to know about why he was so important, fittingly titled "Writer Harlan Ellison: He Has A Mouth, and He Will Scream" (a variation on one of his best known short stories, "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream"). I also reviewed his fine graphic novel Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos and, for his 80th birthday, put forth a primer to his work and what I felt you should read, in his fiction, non-fiction and editorial capacities. So when it came down to writing this tribute to such an important figure in my life, I’m afraid I didn’t have much left to say on the specifics of his life and work. I’ll speak therefore to why I feel he mattered so much to me.

Remembering Kevin Courrier: A Friendship Cemented Through Music

Kevin Courrier passed away on October 12. He would have turned 64 years old today.

I was already very interested in movies when I became friends with Kevin Courrier, the late co-founder of Critics At Large, in the late eighties/early nineties, not long after I graduated from Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Ryerson University) in Toronto and began reviewing films professionally on a freelance basis. We bonded over our affinity for American filmmakers Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg, who were disdained by many of our colleagues, and shared a love of other directors, such as Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy) and Louis Malle (Lacombe, Lucien, Vanya on 42nd Street). But I think I learnt more about music from Kevin than from anyone else. As much as Kevin knew cinema, and he certainly did, I’d say he knew music even better.

The Damned Hurt: Albert Maltz’s The Journey Of Simon Mckeever

While writing about Henry Fonda a few years ago, I learned about a movie project he desired to make late in his life, but never did – an adaptation of a novel called The Journey of Simon McKeever, written by Albert Maltz and published in 1949. I’d never heard of the book. But I got a copy, and read it. It haunted me for days, and I've wanted ever since to tell people about it.

Simon McKeever is seventy-three and lives meagerly in a Sacramento nursing home; his wife and child, both killed in an explosion, are long dead. Born in Ireland and raised in America, he has labored all his life, and now suffers from crippling arthritis. Yet he resolves to hitchhike, by himself, 400 miles of highway to find the doctor someone says will cure him. Simon is a sober, sensible man who accepts pain and even death, but not uselessness; he’s also a man of great complexity and sensitivity who is plagued by Kafkaesque nightmares in which he finds himself to be “a cockroach after all; not a man, a bug.” But above all, Simon is profoundly, rebelliously alive.

Anyone who has read about the McCarthy-era blacklist knows Albert Maltz’s name, even if they can’t quite remember his work. Born in Brooklyn in 1908, he was one of the Hollywood Ten – a group of screenwriters who, called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during its 1947 investigation of Communist influence in the movies, refused to answer questions, and were subsequently banned from the industry and jailed for contempt. Prior to the HUAC hearing, Maltz had been a playwright in the WPA-era Theater Union; an award-winning short story writer and respected novelist; and a screenwriter who, answering Hollywood’s siren call à la his compatriot Clifford Odets, chalked up some decent credits: This Gun for Hire (1942), Pride of the Marines (1945), Cloak and Dagger (1946), The Naked City (1948).

Interview with Matt Dusk and Steve Macdonald

Singer Matt Dusk's new disc is called My Funny Valentine: The Chet Baker Songbook

Talented singer Matt Dusk continues his exploration of the great songs of a bygone era with his new disc, out today, My Funny Valentine: The Chet Baker Songbook (EOne Entertainment). Dusk doesn't call the album a 'tribute' record, which would suggest a copy or aping of Baker's soft singing style, something that Dusk accurately maintains would not fit his crooner voice. Rather, he takes on Baker's catalogue, and finds a happy ground between how he normally swings and how Baker sings. Dusk sat down with Critics At Large's David Churchill to discuss extensively the making of the CD. David also wanted to look a little behind the scenes of how the live performance side of Dusk comes to fruition, so he asked for Steve Macdonald – Dusk's sax player, musical director and “wing man” – to sit in and offer his insights into that side of putting out a disc like this, and ultimately performing the material live.

Hope Versus Despair: The Uninhabitable House We Live In

The recent presidential campaign dredged up a barely-hidden reserve of bigotry in America. That doesn’t seem surprising, of course, but maybe it’s something to sing about. Two lefties, Abe Meeropol and Earl Robinson, composed “The House I Live In,” a 1943 tune about their progressive yet patriotic vision for a country mired in hatred. The lyrics convey faith in our better natures, sort of like the dialogue in Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and Neil Diamond each recorded the anthem for tolerance. Also Frank Sinatra, whose neutered version was delivered in a November 1945 short movie with the same title that denounced anti-Semitism. But he angered Meeropol – who had penned “Strange Fruit” to decry lynching almost a decade earlier – by deleting lines such as “my neighbors white and black.”

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki offers a sharp focus on neighbors white and black with The House I Live In, a wrenching documentary that won the top prize at January’s Sundance festival and has been released theatrically in time for possible Oscar consideration. Robeson’s sonorous bass-baritone is heard over closing credits, after 108 minutes of searing cinematic testimony that points out how far we are from the song’s plea for “a land of wealth and beauty with enough for all to share.”

Deviation From the Norm: Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z (2000)

"You can't have progress without deviation from the norm," composer Frank Zappa once wrote. Glancing back on the history of popular music, it shouldn't come as any surprise that it contains a long list of deviators. Out of their time, and breaking and remaking all the rules, these innovators dauntlessly set out to change history. While gleefully altering our perceptions of the world, these artists deviate most from the norms we take for granted. American outsiders are the most compelling to watch since they tend to transform themselves along with their work.

In 1925, Louis Armstrong, already a major jazz performer, decided to turn the music on its ear with a series of masterful recordings with the Hot Five and Seven. By reconstructing jazz into a soloist's art form, Armstrong was conveying a secret to all Americans: It's more exciting to stand out from the crowd than it is to join it. A few decades later, a young saxophone player from Kansas City named Charlie Parker decided to answer Armstrong's invitation by breaking the rules of standard harmony. While riffing at lightning speed, Parker ingeniously played within the chords themselves. Soon after, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios in Memphis and made the cocky claim that he sounded like nobody else. Within a few years, he effortlessly altered the face of American music.

Dylan in Winter, Part I: The Philosophy of Modern Song

Bob Dylan performing in stage in Los Angeles in 2012. (Photo: Chris Pizzello)

I.

Each of the 66 chapters in Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon & Schuster; 339 pp.) is devoted to a single musical composition, and almost all are split into two parts—a second-person monologue, which reviewers are calling a “riff,” inspired by the song; and a slightly more sober and pedantic critical-historical essay. The playlist (obscure Fifties rock, some R&B and soul, a lot of country, some European imports, pages from the Great American Songbook) is various and appears whimsical. Many songs seem selected as the excuse for some tangent—on money, drugs, women, crime, divorce, our treatment of the elderly—that Dylan has been wanting to deliver. Everyone knows his head is stuffed with songs, and these only scratch the surface of the surface. On a different day he’d surely list other songs, launch other tangents.

Unsung and Unknown - The Wrecking Crew & I Knew it Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale

The Wrecking Crew.

It's largely held to be true that when The Beatles invaded America in 1964, one of the seismic impacts they had was in wiping out the Sixties rebirth of Tin Pan Alley. An ambitious group of songwriters (Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, 'Doc' Pomus and Mort Shuman) were all situated in the Brill Building in New York City there looking to sell hit songs. And many great ones they did indeed sell. But The Beatles proved that by writing your own tunes and playing your own instruments you needn't be solely dependent on other songwriters to provide your material. Pretty soon, just about anyone who could pick up a guitar started performing and composing – but not all of them could do both. In Los Angeles, there lurked a famous collection of somewhat anonymous session musicians – dubbed 'The Wrecking Crew' – who played on an abundance of familiar hits by The Byrds, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, The Monkees, not to mention just about every hit song produced by Phil Spector, including The Ronettes' "Be My Baby," The Crystals' "He's a Rebel" and Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High." Totally unsung, and yet playing key roles in songs ranging from "God Only Knows," "California Dreamin'," "The Beat Goes On," "Last Train to Clarksville" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" to Frank Zappa's masterful orchestral absurdity Lumpy Gravy (1967), the Wrecking Crew were sonic dreamers and dedicated trench soldiers who conjured up a storehouse of memorable hooks, even if, as a nameless group, they existed in the dark.(The album covers for bands like The Monkees didn't even credit them as the players on the record.)

Covering Tom Waits and Bob Dylan

The music of Tom Waits offers a wide palette for singers, but rarely do instrumentalists cover his songs. Dirt In The Ground (Independent) is the second album of Waits covers by the jazz ensemble known as Innocent When You Dream. The band is led by New York native Aaron Shragge, who plays a dragon mouth trumpet, a modified horn specifically shaped to “expand the trumpet’s melodic capacity,” according to his description. The result is a warmer, more ancient sound to the instrument that complements the worldly and melodic sounds of Waits's music. The quintet’s first release was back in 2010, on the simply titled Innocent When You Dream: Celebrating The Music of Tom Waits (Collective Records). While I missed that release, I was pleased to discover this new record of eleven Waits songs beautifully rendered in all their splendour by Shragge’s band. The quintet features Jonathan Lindhorst on tenor sax, Ryan Butler on guitar, Nico Dunn on drums, and Dan Fortin on bass. Three tracks on the album also feature Joe Grass on pedal steel guitar. The album was recorded in Montreal at Studio 270 and the results are wonderful. The band understands the earthiness of Waits's music from the bottom up as opposed to a top-down approach that only works if you’re playing for a vocalist. This quintet has a lot more freedom to play Waits as a joyful grind with melody. Highlights include the quintet’s versions of “Chicago” and “Down In The Hole,” but I also love the ballads “Ol 55” and “Anywhere I Lay My Head.” 

Hitting the Jackpot: Guys and Dolls at the Stratford Festival

Evan Buliung (centre) with members of the company, in Guys and Dolls at the Stratford Festival. (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Let there be no confusion. In Guys and Dolls, the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning musical at Canada's Stratford Festival until the end of October, men are men and women are, well, the dolls in the musical comedy Jo Swerling, Abe Burrows and composer-lyricist Frank Loesser created almost 70 years ago when gender identity, sexual orientation and gender expression were a whole lot less complicated than they are today. Based on newspaper man Damon Runyon's 1930s collection of short stories about the denizens of New York's Depression-era underworld, the show is a throwback. But a rollicking one that makes no apologies for wanting to revel in stereotypical portraits of gangsters, gamblers and showgirls with seam-stockinged gams.

Music, Music, Music: The Most Happy Fella, Merrily We Roll Along and Baritones Unbound

Marnie Parris & Bill Nolte in The Most Happy Fella

Six years passed between Frank Loesser’s hugely successful Guys and Dolls and his next Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella, and the two projects couldn’t have been more different. Guys and Dolls was an effort to find a musical-comedy equivalent for the quirky idiom of Damon Runyon’s stories, where gamblers and gangsters are interchangeable (and basically benign), wear fedoras and pin-stripe suits, and speak without contractions. Loesser’s score is lyrical, but it’s comprised mostly of comic numbers – solos (“Adelaide’s Lament”) duets (“Sue Me,” “Marry the Man Today”) the title song, call-and-response numbers  (“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the two Hot Box showgirl tunes), even a counterpoint trio (“Fugue for Tinhorns”). The Most Happy Fella has a lush romantic score, and there’s so much of it that the original cast recording was released in two versions, a single LP of highlights and a complete three-LP set, in the style of opera recordings. Technically the show is an operetta, since it does contain dialogue sections (which were also written by Loesser). And though it may not be up to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, the two Broadway musicals that are not only extensive enough but also complex enough musically to qualify as operas, it’s extremely ambitious – and surpassingly beautiful. (In fact, the New York City Opera used to keep it in their repertory.) Loesser based it on a 1924 play by Sidney Howard called They Knew What They Wanted – a hit despite that unwieldy title – that starred Richard Bennett and the legendary stage actress Pauline Lord and was filmed three times over the next decade and a half.

“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you”: Our Town and Another Day’s Begun

Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller in Gregory Mosher's production of Our Town, 1989.

I’ve been living with Our Town for more than half a century, so I was startled to discover, in the interviews Howard Sherman conducted with (mostly) actors and directors for his new book Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, that so many theatre people were unfamiliar with the play when they signed on to participate in contemporary productions of it. I encountered Our Town in a literature class during my senior year of high school, and I recall vividly sitting in the front row, rapt, as my teacher read the third act out loud – and struggling, probably pathetically, to hide my tears as Emily, who has just died in childbirth, returns to relive her twelfth birthday but, overcome with the anguish of seeing her precious past from the perspective of one who knows the future, begs the Stage Manager to take her back to her grave on the hill. I fell completely in love with the play – and with Thornton Wilder, who had recently published his penultimate novel, The Eighth Day, which I subsequently devoured. (I reread The Eighth Day a couple of years ago; it really is the masterpiece I took it for at seventeen.) Wilder won the National Book Award for that book, four decades after he’d taken the Pulitzer Prize for his second book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He also won Pulitzers for Our Town and for The Skin of Our Teeth, and he had considerable success with The Matchmaker, which most people know in its musical-comedy adaptation, Hello, Dolly!. Plus he penned the screenplay for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best movies, Shadow of a Doubt.

Blues For Mr. Happy: Remembering Robin Williams

Robin Williams as Parry in The Fisher King.

In The Fisher King (1991), which has the distinction of being the movie that Terry Gilliam was put on Earth to direct, Jeff Bridges plays Jack, a rich, successful radio shock and aspiring sitcom actor who, with his sexual magnetism, long-haired, piratical look, and penthouse apartment, is like the Howard Stern of Howard Stern’s dreams. After goading a regular phone-in caller who proceeds to shoot up a Manhattan bar, Jack’s life and career fall apart; he’s too guilt-stricken to continue what he’s been doing but too cynical and bitter to imagine how to change. He stumbles across a chance for redemption when he meets Parry (Robin Williams), a crazy homeless man who used to a professor of classics until he lost his wife in the massacre at the bar. Parry has fallen in love with Lydia (Amanda Plummer), a mousy accountant he’s never met but who he scuttles after as she slogs to and from the publishing house where she works. Jack decides that if he can get the two of them fixed up, he’ll have repented for his sins and can get back to his rightful place at the top of the fame ladder.

It’s Bridges’ job to keep the audience hooked from the first frames to the last, by being convincingly nasty and self-involved at the start so that Jack’s search for redemption seems like enough of a challenge to be dramatic, while also being sufficiently compelling (and attractive) that nobody watching him will simply say, “Fuck this guy.” But it’s the actor playing Parry who has the greatest potential to send the movie hurtling off a cliff at any minute. He has to get his laughs without making it seem as if the movie is holding someone mentally ill up to ridicule; he has to make the fact that Parry is stalking a total stranger seem moonstruck-romantic, and never creepy. Happily, the role is squarely in Williams’ wheelhouse. He’s able to use the fast-talking, free-associational style he developed doing stand-up comedy—the style that the name “Robin Williams” automatically brings to mind—and fold it into the character, using it as the high-speed ranting of a literate crazy person, whose tongue is racing to keep up with the speed of his mind.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXIV

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (photo by Mary Ellen Matthews)

I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted my love of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. While I have collected and enjoyed Petty’s music for years, I’ve never taken the time to contemplate why his best songs (and there are many) have always brought me such happiness. But for the last 40 years, Petty and The Heartbreakers helped keep some of the idealistic dreams of the sixties alive. They didn’t, however, do it by showing a nostalgic reverence for the era and its music. Rather they captured the music’s urgency, its uncompromising demand for freedom which lies right at the heart of all rock & roll. Whether it’s in an anthem like “I Won’t Back Down,” a plaintive ballad like “Southern Accents,” or a scorching rocker like “You Wreck Me,” Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers created an immediacy that made each song sound both fresh and fully alive with possibility. For those who remember the joy they felt when a great song came through their tiny earphone on their transistor radio, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers brought that instant delight to the music they played. I think critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine nailed Petty’s appeal and longevity perfectly when he said that he and The Heartbreakers "didn’t break from tradition the way their punk contemporaries did. Instead, they celebrated it, culling the best parts of The British Invasion, American garage rock, and Dylanesque singer/songwriters to create a distinctly American hybrid that recalled the past without being indebted to it.”