Tag Archives: barry gifford

Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on

On this date in 1958, Marlon Brando began filming his sole directorial effort, One-Eyed Jacks (1961). I posted this last year, but it bears repeating. It’s the chapter on Timothy from the book Brando Rides Alone (2004) by Barry Gifford.

3. Timothy Carey

Now here’s a character, a real character let alone a character actor. I’ll never, ever forget Timothy Carey as the rifleman who shoots and kills the racehorse in Kubrick’s The Killing, or as the mob thug in Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and certainly not as the drunken lout in One-Eyed Jacks. With a lock of lank black hair always falling over one eye, Carey careened around menacingly in whatever context he appeared. His voice was deep but sounded as if he were always gargling, words bubbling up, burping at his listeners. Carey was big and darkly depraved looking – out of control scary, which often made him seem worse than Lawrence Tierney’s troubled personae. If little kids saw him lurching along the sidewalk headed their way, they’d abandon their toys and run. I saw him on a latenight TV talk show, wearing a too-small Hawaiian shirt, detailing for the horrified host his life’s work: the study of flatulence. He was deranged, not dangerous, I guessed. Tom Luddy, who worked for Francis Coppola, once gave me, for a reason I no longer remember, Timothy Carey’s address and telephone number, which I still have in my directory – he lived in El Monte, California – but I never got in touch with him other than telepathically, and a few years ago he died. In an essay I wrote about an absurd little 1955 movie called Finger Man, I described Carey as being unequaled at The Unbridled Snarl. He couldn’t control his hands or his hair. He justified the French intellectual’s image of the typical American male. And just what do I know about how French intellectuals think? you may well ask. And while you’re at it, exactly what – or who – is a typical American male?

Brando and Tim on the One-Eyed Jacks set

Barry Gifford on “Finger Man”

Posted by Marisa on

A while back I said I was going to post this, and now I’m finally getting around to it. This is from Barry Gifford’s great book Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir.

FINGER MAN

1955. Directed by Harold Schuster. Starring Frank Lovejoy, Forrest Tucker, Peggie Castle, and Timothy Carey.

I must have first seen Timothy Carey in one of those low-budget 1950s movies, playing a heavy as he does in Finger Man. The first two films I can actually remember him in, however, are One-Eyed Jacks (1961) with Marlon Brando, where he played a stupid, womanpawing thug, his only lines snarls; and one of the idiotic Beach Blanket epics of the early ’60s, with Carey as a drooling, leering goon named South Dakota Slim. Later, of course, John Cassavetes used him in Minnie and Moskowitz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, both small roles; but the opening scene in Minnie, the only one shot in New York [Marisa’s note: Actually it was shot in downtown Los Angeles], where Carey monologizes in a diner, is worth seeing the film for. Even in Finger Man he’s nothing more than a snarling brute, but an effective one. And that’s the point: at what he does, Timothy Carey is non-pareil. He’s a bizarre screen presence, a Neanderthal-like hulk in modern dress; frightening.

Carey makes Finger Man interesting. The shots of him stalking Frank Lovejoy, threatening Lovejoy in a restaurant, growling, snarling [Carey is unequaled at The Unbridled Snarl], grabbing women’s arms, attempting to grin, are priceless. He plays a thug, naturally, who works for a crime boss played by Forrest Tucker. Lovejoy is a three-time loser who goes over and cooperates as an undercover man for the Treasury Department in order to avoid going up for life. Lovejoy infiltrates Tucker’s mob of liquor hijackers and nightclub lowlifes, takes up with a former B-girl of Tucker’s and takes The Big Step to turn his life around. He’s also got a psycho-alcoholic sister with a little girl that he tries to save, another refugee from Tucker’s tentacles. Frank Lovejoy was always a flat actor, pretty much dead in the water. It’s not even amusing, really, to watch him interact with Forrest Tucker, another woodenhead, in this one. The women rave and rant and snicker and spark a little, but these guys, along with the Treasury cops, are lifeless…

What transpires according to the script doesn’t mean a thing and is barely worth following. It’s Timothy Carey who takes the cake. He’s spooky, menacing, ugly; a deranged gorilla in a coat and hat. He slobbers, and can’t control his hands or his hair, which keeps falling in his face. Some of the photography here is interesting: low angle approach shots and the odd tilted street keep it visually intriguing. The men in this movie are crude, mean, stupid; the women exploited, stunted, abused. Nothing pretty here except for the stagey ending meant to be scoffed at. Timothy Carey justifies the French intellectual’s image of the typical American male.

The Unbridled Snarl

Pic of the Day: “Finger Man”

Posted by Marisa on

Thank God it’s Friday! And here is our pic of the day. It’s from Harold D. Schuster’s Finger Man (1955), which we saw a video clip from not too long ago. Tim is Lou Terpe, the woman-pawing torpedo who ultimately reveals his true cowardly nature.

Finger Man
Author Barry Gifford wrote a great appreciation of Tim in this film in his book Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir. It deserves to be quoted in full, which I will do at a later date. It bears repeating that this is the film that brought Tim to Stanley Kubrick’s attention.

From “Brando Rides Alone”

Posted by Marisa on

I’d like to share with you this piece from Barry Gifford’s Brando Rides Alone (2004), his meditation on the film One-Eyed Jacks (1961).

3. Timothy Carey

Now here’s a character, a real character let alone a character actor. I’ll never, ever forget Timothy Carey as the rifleman who shoots and kills the racehorse in Kubrick’s The Killing, or as the mob thug in Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and certainly not as the drunken lout in One-Eyed Jacks. With a lock of lank black hair always falling over one eye, Carey careened around menacingly in whatever context he appeared. His voice was deep but sounded as if he were always gargling, words bubbling up, burping at his listeners. Carey was big and darkly depraved looking – out of control scary, which often made him seem worse than Lawrence Tierney’s troubled personae. If little kids saw him lurching along the sidewalk headed their way, they’d abandon their toys and run. I saw him on a latenight TV talk show, wearing a too-small Hawaiian shirt, detailing for the horrified host his life’s work: the study of flatulence. He was deranged, not dangerous, I guessed. Tom Luddy, who worked for Francis Coppola, once gave me, for a reason I no longer remember, Timothy Carey’s address and telephone number, which I still have in my directory – he lived in El Monte, California – but I never got in touch with him other than telepathically, and a few years ago he died. In an essay I wrote about an absurd little 1955 movie called Finger Man, I described Carey as being unequaled at The Unbridled Snarl. He couldn’t control his hands or his hair. He justified the French intellectual’s image of the typical American male. And just what do I know about how French intellectuals think? you may well ask. And while you’re at it, exactly what – or who – is a typical American male?