Payday (1973)
Payday is one of those pictures that might play better now than it did in 1973; as a retort to the continued wave of movies that pretend to be about various music stars, or the generic life of a star, but are actually about indulging in our personal wishes to be rich and famous. Payday is the perfect, the only, title for this picture; an acknowledgment of an undercurrent we (or I) nearly always imagine as we (or I) digest all the usual encouragement clichés of most musical movies. Almost Famous, Ray and Walk the Line are a few such movies; downplaying drugged, pilled, boozed-up milieus as utopias of self-actualization, while managing to keep in mind what the screenwriters’ manuals say about “likeable heroes”. The creation of art amidst these inner-outer chaotic lifestyles, or the possibility of achieving some sort of personal redemption with this art, is nearly always left unexplored. And that can nag.
The conflict is that I, to varying degrees, like most of these movies. Almost Famous floats on a wishful thinking cloud. Director Cameron Crowe seems to be acknowledging that, yes, he lived those years with the Allmans and Zeppelin, but what he really always sought was to disappear into a Billy Wilder or Francois Truffaut movie with a girl of his dreams who got him. There’s an unintended heartbreak to that subtext, and Almost Famous has beautiful passages, but it breaks Lester Bangs’ rules, voiced in the movie, to remain “merciless”; and that is both the best and the worst thing about the movie. Ray and Walk the Line are star-vehicles, and the various stars are terrific in an immediate-hold-the-screen kind of way, though a major faux pas remains: that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash somehow managed to inspire the same damn movie. Even Walk Hard, an attempted parody of these pictures, is funny, but just as hypocritical-too in love with its subjects to get to anything else.
Payday is the anything else, and this, alone, justifies its de rigueur for the 1970s glass-half-empty outlook. We need a picture that’s as confidently black as others are white. Don Carpenter, the writer, and Daryl Duke, the director, have an ambivalence towards their characters that packs a genuine force. Little subtle-haunting flourishes of observation bubble up throughout the picture on the sidelines, and they slowly accumulate to something casually devastating. Rip Torn stars as Maury Dan, a wannabe country legend who’s courting success from the fringe. People recognize Maury, and he can get laid just about whenever he wants, but he’s not yet an icon-more like an uncle you really liked at a barbeque once but can’t quite remember. Carpenter and Duke patiently dole out Dan’s nature and identity bit by bit and, about seventy minutes in, we realize that our natural-bred tendency to revere those who stand in the spotlight has been played against us-those bits revealed to be something quite foul.
Rip Torn is intuitive, confident and amazing, lacking any trace of actor editorializing. Torn finds the pleasure, the entitlement, the buzzy, self-hating damage, and still manages to make the bastard likeable and sexy without canceling any of the other shadows out. (Most actors have to compromise in some department somewhere.) This is a musical picture that recognizes that the music springs from the same place as the damage, and that they are undividable-a paradox of creation. Torn’s multi-tiered performance has another effect too: it humanizes the supporting characters (Torn is so effective, so contradictory, that we understand why the others fall for it).
The picture opens on Torn singing a song (“She’s Only a Country Girl”) during a gig, and the free-wheeling camera allows us to find him for ourselves as we also sift through the various band members, fans, hangers-on, and ladies, all destined to remain on the periphery. In a few largely dialogue-free minutes, the film establishes the world completely and organically (in league with some Altman). The dialogue, to echo the Melvin and Howard post, occasionally strives for poetry, but it’s the poetry of the cynical (the poetry of the people who hold a drink with a cigarette butt floating in it) and it works without compromising the airy, natural vibe of the picture. Trying to get a girl in bed, one of the guys exclaims, “Girl, you came here on purpose, and this here is the purpose!”
The picture isn’t a civics lesson. The encounters in Payday, even at their worst, are staged with vitality and humor. Power-plays are made over Dr. Peppers and sandwiches with or without mayo. Leagues of disgust are revealed in how hastily someone discards a piece of bubblegum. Some of the episodes (in a disc jockey’s office, or, over a dog, or, later, a woman, who is abandoned for exploding into inconvenient hurt) have that occasionally-out-of-nowhere strange tang of the real. Everyone in the cast registers. Ahna Capri, as the blonde woman left on the road, is allowed a simultaneous pain and hypocrisy: you’re repulsed by and for her in equal measures. Cliff Emmich’s disquietingly obliging driver, Michael C. Gwynne’s manager, who treats a murder as just another misstep to be sidestepped, etc., etc. By the end, Maury Dan and crew have attained something that few of these types of pictures manage: a true untidy-monster-grace.
