52 Pick-Up - Perils of Adultery

Nov

15

52 Pick-Up - Perils of Adultery

≡ Category: Drama, Movie Reviews, Recommended, Suspense, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama/Suspense
Director: John Frankenheimer
Year: 1986

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

Film adaptations of Elmore Leonard novels often end up being fairly entertaining, at least when they stick close to the source material (In the case of 52 Pick-Up, Leonard cowrote the screenplay with John Steppling). That’s because Leonard’s characters demonstrate character through their actions. There aren’t almost any interior monologues in Leonard’s novels. What you see is what you get.

Let’s take 52 Pick-Up. Alan Raimy (John Glover) wants to blackmail industrialist Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider). Raimy has taken compromising pictures of Mitchell with a dancer from a strip club. Mitchell wants to avoid admitting the affair to his wife, Barbara (Ann-Margret). Even worse, Barbara is running for City Council. If the affair should come out, her political career will be destroyed before it gets a chance to start. But above all, Harry’s a realist — he knows that if he starts paying, he’ll never stop.

What follows is a game of chicken, with each side progressively raising the stakes.

There are other players involved: Leo Franks (Robert Trebor), a slimy peep show operator, Bobby Shy (Clarence Williams III), a stone thug, and Doreen (Vanity), Bobby’s stripper girlfriend. Raimy himself is a sociopath who fancies himself a director, and has some training as an accountant.

Besides the twists and turns of the plot, a lot of the fun of 52 Pick-Up is the mileau, the low-rent adult entertainment business. Director John Frankenheimer uses a variety of actors from the real world of porn, which gives a party scene in particular an entertainingly icky verisimilitude.

These are fun characters. Clarence Williams III, with his thousand yard convict stare, is both chilling and amusing. There’s a great scene where he smothers his girlfriend with an oversized Teddy Bear. John Glover is spectacularly hateful as Raimy. Raimy thinks he’s much smarter than he is, and has a charming indifference to other people’s suffering. Robert Trebor gives a great comic performance, whether he’s panicking, trying to weasel out of a predicament, or begging for mercy. Roy Scheider is the tough but sensitive guy he usually plays, familiar from such movies as Jaws, The French Connection, and Blue Thunder.

John Frankenheimer directs the action scenes without a lot of fuss, but imparts a no-nonsense energy to them, which, come to think of it, isn’t a whole lot different from his approach to dialog. It’s not like Frankenheimer announces an action set piece. The whole thing is a continuum. There are really no slow spots. 52 Pick-Up crackles pretty much the whole way through.

52 Pick-Up, like most Elmore Leonard movies, isn’t going to change your life. It’s about nothing more than the situation these characters find themselves in. There’s no subtext. But who cares when it’s this much fun?