To wash away the sins of yesterday’s post, we turn to Brother Carey as he sermonizes against the dangers of “the devil’s holy water” in the 1981 television miniseries version of John Steinbeck‘s epic novel East of Eden, directed by Harvey Hart.
I need to do a side-by-side comparison of Timothy’s roles in both this version and Elia Kazan‘s 1955 film, in which he portrayed a man not nearly so holy and righteous. Repent and be saved, brothers and sisters.
Whether looming over the strangely invertebrate James Dean as the muscle of the local brothel in East of Eden or buying the farm in a whisker-quick saloon shoot-out with Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, the disheveled, vertiginous Timothy Carey performed, through much of his career, as the kind of thespian rarity whose flickering presence, even when bereft of a fleshed-out “character,” struck a loud, long-resonating note in the frequently seam-riddled “seamless narratives” it embellished. Like a portal into a reality hidden from view by scopophobic hysteria, Carey materialized from an alternate universe devoid of heroes and legible story lines.
Available accounts and filmographies of Carey’s early career typify his roles in exploitation pictures as “oozing malevolence,” citing creepy gangster turns in Andre de Toth‘s Crime Wave and Harold D. Schuster‘s Finger Man, as well as uncredited parts in Billy Wilder’s The Big Carnival [aka Ace in the Hole - ed.] and William A. Wellman‘s Across the Wide Missouri. In 1953′s The Wild One, he got to spray Brando in the face with a shaken-up carbonated beverage – some say beer, others soda pop. He was physically attacked by Richard Widmark during the filming of The Last Wagon in 1956, and pummeled by Karl Malden on the set of One-Eyed Jacks, or so the legends go; according to some of Carey’s enthusiasts, his parts got progressively bigger in B-circuit pictures for a time, then shrank as his uninhibited behavior off-camera, and scene-swiping on, earned him the poisonous sobriquet of being “difficult.”
Only the sharpest and restive of “great” directors, and the most cynically astute hacks, recognized Carey’s innate ability to enlarge a piece of cinema into something beyond cinema. Anecdotal evidence reflects how often even those who perceived Carey’s ungovernable grandeur were either prevented from casting him, or themselves provoked by his antics into tossing him out of a picture.
He was, in effect, too much of what he was, too formidably present to evaporate into a peripheral presence; both his imposing physicality and his avid wish to smuggle something living into something simulated got him scotched from films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Grifters; the insecurity of Harvey Keitel purportedly scrapped a major role in Reservoir Dogs; Carey, by his own account, sabotaged his own way out of The Godfather and Godfather II.
- Gary Indiana, “Timothy Carey: The Refusal of the Repressed,” from Dead Flowers (Participant Press/VoxPopuli, 2011)
THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER (1963)
Music like the worst nightmare the Cramps ever had.
Timothy Carey – the charismatically malevolent “heavy” of The Killing, The Wild One, Paths of Glory, and East of Eden – single-handedly made this film between 1960 and 1963 in and around the town of El Monte, outside Los Angeles. Its plot centers on forty-year-old Clarence, who quits his job at an insurance company so that he can don the mantle of a rock star and run for public office as God. Carey’s portrayal of a rock star in a gold suit backed by a ragtag Mexican band is so fantastically bizarre that it puts Salvador Dali (Carey’s idol) to shame. During his main performance, which is sour and atonal, Carey falls to his knees and screams, “Please! Please! Please!” (Without ever having seen or heard of James Brown!)
The World’s Greatest Sinner isn’t a music movie per se, but its soundtrack stands out. For the background music, Carey hired a young, unproven local odd-ball, Frank Zappa, to compose a full orchestral score. Their association was short-lived, however. Appearing on the Steve Allen show playing a bicycle, Zappa made disparaging remarks about the film that earned Carey’s lifelong enmity. (Still, they both made cameo appearances in the Monkees‘ Head.) Although this crude but uniquely imaginative undertaking was ignored by major distributors when it first came out, history has heaped kudos on The World’s Greatest Sinner – and on Carey for his bravery, wit, and vision. Fans, take note: Still alive, Carey makes occasional film and TV appearances. He also pops up at showings of his films at revival houses around L.A. In early 1991, he was completing a stage play, The Insect Trainer, about a postal worker killed by a fart.
- Art Fein, from Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Movies by Marshall Crenshaw (HarperPerennial, 1994)
Timothy Agoglia Carey was born in 1929. His father Joseph was second-generation Irish, a former fireman who lost his job after an accident and died of a stroke at work in a Wall Street elevator. His mother Ida was the daughter of Rocco Agoglia, founder of the Bank of Agoglia in Brooklyn, where Timothy grew up in the wake of the Great Depression. His role model elder brother, Joseph, died at sixteen, and then his elder sister Cecelia contracted meningitis and died at fifteen.
Carey never discussed such hard aspects of his early life, but these biographical details are significantly echoed in The World’s Greatest Sinner, in which two of his primary preoccupations, the fear of death and his aversion to money, are openly addressed. A characteristic plot point in The World’s Greatest Sinner is the death of the main character’s mother. While the hero is wailing over her open coffin, the actor was in reality grieving for his real mother who passed during the making of the film.
- Vassily Bourikas, “Cinema Justice,” from Dead Flowers (Participant Press/Vox Populi, 2011)
Timothy and his mother
The Agoglia family crypt at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn
Tim Carey and Seymour Cassel had a number of personal conflicts, and a few fights almost broke out between them. Carey was a notorious ham and scene-stealer, averse to direction, who more or less did whatever he felt like doing in his scenes; Cassel was similar, and the combination was volatile. (By the same virtue, both actors brought a lot of originality to their work. Carey’s shirt and white gloves in the restaurant scene and the way he eats his spinach were entirely his own invention. These were the sorts of things that made other directors shy away from using Carey but which Cassavetes adored.) [...] Tim Carey told me about many other times Cassavetes gleefully spent hours filming something when he must have known that he wouldn’t be able to include more than a few seconds of it in the film. (One example was a long sequence in the garage in which Carey’s character sang ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ over and over to Cosmo.)
- Ray Carney, from “Chapter 8: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1975)”, Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Faber and Faber Ltd., 2001)
Zappa still thought that the best way to get his music played was to write film scores and in June 1961 another opportunity presented itself: The World’s Greatest Sinner, one of the most eccentric (rather than experimental) films ever made. It was an independent movie produced, directed, written and starring the great character actor Timothy Carey – ‘the ugliest man alive’ – veteran of bit parts in everything from The Wild One (1954), where he throws beer in Brando’s face; East of Eden (1955); The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957). Brando liked him and used him in One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Frank always enjoyed Carey’s films, though he preferred the weird crazed ones like Rumble On the Docks (1956), a juvenile delinquent movie.
Frank met Timothy Carey at Wallach’s Music City in Hollywood while he was working on The Second Time Around, a western comedy. ‘A fellow came up to me and complemented me on my acting,’ recalled Carey. ‘He said he was a composer and the guy he came with, his next-door neighbour, played the guitar. I said, “What’s your name?” He said, “Frank Zappa.” So I said, “OK, I have something for you. We have no music for The World’s Greatest Sinner. If you can supply the orchestra and a place to tape it, you have the job.” And that’s what he did.’
The World’s Greatest Sinner is the story of a dissatisfied middle-aged insurance clerk named Clarence Hilliard who wakes up one day and decides that he is God: ‘We should be Gods, every one of us here, super human beings!’ He starts his own church, gets a guitar and fake goatee, acquires an Elvis Presley silver lame’ suit and works his audiences into a frenzy with wild, furious, rock ‘n’ roll shows, throwing himself around the stage, flopping about on his back as if he were having an epileptic fit and diving into the audience. He runs for President, has sex with 14-year-old groupies, seduces an 80-year-old woman for her money and drives a man to suicide. This disjointed, totally anarchic film uses flash forwards, upside down shots, breaks into full colour at the end and is narrated by the Devil, represented by a stentorian-voiced boa-constrictor. Just Zappa’s sort of film. Carey began work on it in 1958, shooting most of the scenes in his garage in El Monte. It cost $100,000 in total. [...]
…In March [1962] Zappa was interviewed by the Pomona Progress-Bulletin about The World’s Greatest Sinner. Under the headline ONTARIO MAN WRITES SCORE FOR NEW FILM the paper described Tim Carey as ‘Hollywood’s “ugliest, meanest” character actor’ and revealed that Zappa played guitar, drums, piano and vibraphone. Zappa described the film as ‘arty’ and said, intriguingly, ‘The score is unique in that it uses every type of music.’ [...]
His performance [on The Steve Allen Show on March 14, 1963] certainly irritated Timothy Carey whose movie had premiered six weeks before. Carey: ‘That’s where our friendship stopped. Steve asked him what films he did. He said he did The World’s Greatest Sinner, the world’s worst film, and all the actors were from skid row. It wasn’t true.’ Carey said that Frank was just saying that to curry favour. He described how on the opening night at the Directors’ Guild, Frank had been in such awe of his surroundings he walked into a window and banged his head. At the premiere at the Vista-Continental Theater in Hollywood on 30 January 1963, Carey, ever the showman, appeared in his silver lame’ preacher suit with GOD stitched on the sleeves and got the evening off to an exciting start by firing a .38 over the heads of the audience.
- Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography (Grove Press, 2004)
ACK! I knew there was one I forgot!! One last death scene, folks. This is from Bert I. Gordon‘s The Boy and the Pirates (1960). Morgan the pirate has just been shot by Captain Blackbeard (Murvyn Vye) as Hunter (Than Wyenn) wonders if he’s next.
In his autobiography, The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.I.G. (2009), Gordon wrote about the challenge of writing an unnamed “pirate actor” (which he later confirmed to me was indeed Timothy) out of the film, due to what he described as borderline violent behavior with the film’s young star, Charles Herbert. “When I gave him the new pages the next day,” Gordon relates, “he asked me how he could get killed in the beginning of the movie when, according to the screenplay, he appears in the rest of the film, until the end. Of course I lied. I told him the new scene was to be a new ending with his death at the very end. He bought it, and we quickly set up the scene on the ship’s deck… filmed it in record time… and our production manager quickly handed him his notice of completion.” Strange thing is, Morgan’s death does come very close to the end of the film. Herbert talked about his experience working with Tim here. He doesn’t mention Tim being too rough with him on the set, but he did find him rather scary!
Our pic for today is an interesting behind-the-scenes shot from Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Timothy and Brando appear to be going over their big fight scene.
Thanks to the awesome Toby Roan, who runs the great 50 Westerns From The 50s blog and is writing a book on the making of One-Eyed Jacks, we now know why Tim’s character, Howard Tetley, looks like he’s been beaten up. He has been! Toby sent me copies of several pages of the original script, which depict Tetley drunkenly taking on all comers, challenging them to knock him off of a wooden sawhorse type of thing. Several men, including Sheriff Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), have a grand time rearranging Tetley’s face. It’s just too bad most of Timothy’s scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. They would have gone a long way towards defining his character.
Although Carey’s scenes have the strangely elastic compression Kubrick uses throughout The Killing, in both he deploys a fantastic range of gestural nuances that all but eradicate the other player. Stroking the puppy, rubbing an eye with his finger, creasing his ponderous eyebrows, rolling his tongue in his mouth, spitting; his voices segues from velvety softness to rustlike scraping through the same convexity of clenched teeth, suggesting wildly careening states churning inside an unknowable noggin. Carey’s scenes with the parking lot guard are a movie nestled inside a movie, an episodic delirium in which even his shooting the horse and, moments later, being shot by the guard, transpire at the same eerily even temperature, truly like events in a dream.
- Gary Indiana, “Timothy Carey: The Refusal of the Repressed,” from Dead Flowers (Participant Press/VoxPopuli, 2011)
This week’s “quote” is actually a short essay/story by Chris Tsakis. It appears in the book O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors (Vintage Books, 1999). It’s in the form of an interior monologue that might have gone on in Timothy’s head during the filming of Paths of Glory (1957). It doesn’t sound at all like the Timothy I’ve come to know, but hey – creative license and all. There’s some salty language herein, so look out.
TIMOTHY CAREY
My head is too fucking large. My eyes. . . Jesus. The lids droop. I look sleepy all the time. My nose is okay, a little big but not all that out of proportion. I can’t breathe with it too well so my mouth hangs open most of the time. Gives me the look of an idiot or a criminal. Or an idiot criminal.
When I smile my thin lips pull taut against my gums and I end up grimacing. I always end up grimacing. Like a creep.
I don’t like looking at myself too much but this beard and mustache is a new thing for me. I can’t decide if I like it or not. I think I’ll shave it as soon as this fucking picture is wrapped. If it’s ever wrapped.
I like my hair alright. It’s thick and seems to be staying where it belongs. I ain’t going bald, anyway. I got my grandfather’s hair and it pisses my old man off something fierce. Fuck him, too.
Even with the full head of hair this is not what you’d call an attractive face. Mean. Bony. Like a horse’s. Not a leading man’s face. I’ll never be a leading man. Not the romantic hero, the best friend, the standup guy. If they want a scumbag, they call me. I can give them the best fucking scumbag you ever saw.
Need a bouncer to chase James Dean away from the bordello where his mother works? Call me. Need a nasty biker? Call me. Need a guy to shoot a horse? Need a coward? Call me.
That’s enough of this staring at myself shit. Fuck, I can’t stand vain men. Guys who study themselves in the mirror, guys who worry about every damn wrinkle. Guys in this business.
Kirk is almost like that. He’s almost too concerned with his appearance. The tyranny of the face is known only to the leading man. And Kirk is a leading man if ever there was one. He’s not as bad as some I’ve known. Brando – now there was a prima donna – couldn’t walk past a mirror without admiring himself. Worse than Dean. Half a fag, if you ask me. Marvin wanted to actually kick the shit out of him, not just pretend for the camera. He comes to me one day with a bottle of bourbon, still in his Chino getup, and says, “Howsabout when the cameras start rolling I actually clean Marlon’s fucking clock?” I said, “Go ahead, Lee – they’ll throw you off the picture and I’ll angle for your part.” That shut him up pretty fast.
Christ, I have to call Marvin. We’re supposed to get together and play some poker one of these nights. But he’s a hell of a lot busier than I am these days. Even if he’s almost as ugly as me. We were bitching to each other about the parts we get because of our faces. I was much more pissed off about it than he was. “I ain’t ugly . . .” he said, in that booming voice, “. . . I got character.” We laughed. I laughed harder. I’ve adopted that line for myself. “I ain’t ugly . . .”
Fucking yes I am.
And Hollywood knows it. A bunch of one-dimensional shits. Every movie is a silent movie, a fucking cartoon. Guy on the screen supposed to be capable, good-hearted, and virtuous? Get some tall pretty boy with a strong chin. Guy supposed to be a thief, a louse, a filthy piece of shit? Call Carey!
They cast me when they want the ugliness to show through, the ugliness they think I have in my heart. They don’t know what’s in my heart. They don’t give a shit. “Get that ugly fuck Carey!” they probably shout. “We got a stupid scumbag we want him to play.”
In my experience – stupid scumbag that I am – most beautiful people have the ugliest souls. They never have to do anything but stand around being admired, catered to, ass-kissed. As long as their looks hold they’ll always have work, always have someone telling ‘em just how great they are.
But I’m not beautiful. I’m a “character” actor. Which is a polite term for an ugly guy or gal who’s gonna die or kill someone or otherwise provide some “color.”
Like on this film. I’m a prisoner. A coward. A pawn. I’m going up in front of a firing squad for being yellow. But this movie’s not about me, even though I get shot through the fucking heart. It’s about Kirk, about Colonel Dax and his moral goddamn dilemma. You can tell he’s good – just look at his face! Meanwhile, me and two other guys are being put to death ’cause we’re ugly bastards. Because we look like cowards, mostly.
Fucking hot in here. Even sitting in front of the fan it’s hot. Up at six this morning, on the set at seven and now it’s ten and I still haven’t done a fucking thing. Just sitting around smoking cigarettes. Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait.
I hate this costume they got me in – it itches like hell. Where’s my cigarettes? There’s no pockets in this goddamn thing. I wish they’d hurry up and get this damn shot set up. I can’t stand the goddamn waiting while Kubrick makes everything just so. The man is a motherfucking perfectionist. I’ve been in plenty of fucking movies and no one works like this guy. He takes hours just to set lights, for Christ’s sake. What’s the big deal? Just some ugly guys getting shot.
Christ, I have to fart. Fart proudly, Benjamin Franklin said. Me too. A fart never killed anyone, unless you keep it in. Just let it go. Even so, I don’t want to fart in front of Kubrick. He doesn’t seem like a guy who appreciates a good fart. I bet he goes into his trailer when he has to break wind. So proper. Weird fucking guy.
He hasn’t said much to me. Just told me that this guy I’m playing is a little slow, maybe a coward, maybe not. When we were shooting The Killing he sat down with me and told me the guy I was going to play was – guess what? – a coward. “He’ll do anything to get by,” he said. Well, not anything. The guy wouldn’t work a legitimate job. He’d steal, he’d murder . . . cut whatever corners he has to. Why? Just look at his face. Ugly fuck.
I was so ugly I had to call that poor parking lot attendant a nigger when all the kid wanted to do is be friends. I didn’t want to call him a nigger, but I had to get rid of the kid before that horse came into the open. I was supposed to shoot the horse from my car – shit, you’ve seen the picture – as a diversion from the robbery and the kid won’t leave me alone so I snap at him and call him “nigger.” I got such shit for that part. I got a guy who wanted to punch my lights out ’cause he confused me with the guy in the movie. And the guy in the movie got shot. Shot dead.
What am I doing in this business? Feeding the fucking stereotype, I suppose.
I stuck my ugly, stereotypical face in front of Stanley’s just this morning. I said, “Stanley, they got me dying quietly in this script. I want to make some noise, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to die quietly.” He said he’d think about it. What the hell is there to think about? Put me in front of a firing squad on a trumped-up charge and I’d have plenty to say about it, ugly face or no ugly face.
Christ, I’m bored. I’m bored to tears. And my head is pounding. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to be shot to death and all I can muster is this damn headache. My neck is completely stiff, too. I wish we could get this thing over with already. I want to be shot now.
Just got the call to the set. This is it. Final makeup adjustment, final costume adjustment, Stanley comes over, tells me to react however I’d like when it’s time for the close-up. How would I react if there were a bunch of guys with guns pointed at me, ready to fire? I wouldn’t stand there with my big ugly mouth shut. I would plead for my life. I would blubber. I would break down.
I like life too much to have it taken away like this. I’ll go kicking and screaming. They’ll see the fear in my eyes, the terror on my face, they’ll know they’re doing the wrong thing. I’ll make them know. It’ll be all over my face – my ugly face.
Oh yeah. I ain’t ugly – I got character.
Now to die.
May 11, 1994 – Timothy Carey, 65, a heavy-eyed character actor who often played villains and whose films ranged from Paths of Glory and One-Eyed Jacks to 1960s beach movies, died today at a hospital in Los Angeles after a stroke.
