Post by Bill Schenley"Joe" was the first time I saw Peter Boyle. Cool flick. Great
character ...
<Paraphrased>
"Forty percent of all liberals are queers,
and that's a fact. The Wallace people
took a poll."
...Harlan Ellison, in addition to his being a television critic for the
Los Angeles Free Press in 1970, did an occasional film piece for the
paper as well. Perhaps the most interesting of the latter was his
critique of JOE in the 25 September 1970 issue. The film, and Peter
Boyle in particular, had such a devastating effect on Ellison that he
claimed, "it took my director friend, Max Katz, and his lady, Karen, to
help me up the aisle. I could not focus. I was trembling like a man with
malaria. There was a large potted tree on the sidewalk outside the
theater. I managed to get to it, and sat there, unable to communicate,
for twenty minutes. I was no good for two days after...[JOE] is a
viceral experience on a par with going black-beltine with Bruce Lee. JOE
will kick the shit out of you. It will set the blood slamming against
your cranial walls. It will make you as cold as Ultima Thule." Three
years later, upon the release of STEELYARD BLUES, Ellison attempted to
interview Boyle for The Staff (a successor of sorts to the L.A. Free
Press) but was still in such awe of the actor that he couldn't complete
the job to his own satisfaction, so he titled the resulting article "A
Sort of An Interview with Peter Boyle." Both pieces are highlights of
the collection HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING, which is well worth the trek
to the library to track down...
...probably my favourite movie-watching experience involving Boyle was
seeing him pop up in MEDIUM COOL as the gun range manager who is
interviewed by Robert Forster for a TV news report. I was only 9 years
old when that picture (originally branded with an X rating for purely
political reasons) was released, so I didn't get a chance to see it
until The Movie Channel ran it circa '79. By that time, of course, Boyle
had become a familiar face to me from TAXI DRIVER and HARDCORE, among
other things. It turned out that MEDIUM COOL was his second credited
movie role, and it was made almost simultaneously in Chicago with THE
MONITORS, a strange science fiction satire that I recall liking when I'd
seen it a spell before (Boyle had a small role in that one as well).
MEDIUM COOL is on DVD, THE MONITORS isn't even on VHS. I have to admit I
also liked Boyle's over-zealous Detective Ryan in TURK 182!, a picture
that I think has been maligned well past any limit it deserved to have
been...
--
King Daevid MacKenzie, WLSU-FM 88.9 La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA
http://www.myspace.com/kingdaevid
heard Sundays 8:00 A.M. PST/PDT at
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"You can live in your dreams, but only if you are worthy of them."
HARLAN ELLISON