Everybody wants to weigh in when it comes to deciding the music world's crown prince of darkness. Some say it's Brian Jones or Keith Richards, others favor Miles Davis, Lou Reed or Robert Johnson. Some will even tell you Karen Carpenter wins the title hands down.
Me, I'm betting on Johnny Cash.
A complex, difficult human being and a revolutionary musician, Johnny Cash finally gets his very own biopic with Walk the Line, but it's not quite the biopic he deserves. Walk the Line is an engaging, star-studded production that gives us a more or less accurate accounting of Cash's life, but there's a generic feeling to the movie very much at odds with the edginess of its subject. The film is certainly appealing in a pleasant, polished sort of way, but it rarely digs too deep or gets too close to the personal demons that made the man and his music so compelling.
Following all the basic rules of music biopics, Walk the Line unfolds a bit like a poor man's Ray, beginning with obligatory flashbacks of a Southern childhood spent working the fields, singing hymns and butting heads with a stern, tobacco-spitting father. There's even a beloved brother in there who dies young and tragically, providing our hero with source material for a lifetime of psychological baggage.
The movie follows Cash's rise to stardom in the '50s and his subsequent fall, duly noting the marital problems, the drug problems, the inevitable cold turkey turn-around and the eventual comeback. But the movie is a little too concerned with creating an overly tidy arc out of the events of Cash's life, and in pinning his inner turmoil conveniently and almost exclusively on his years of thwarted love for the woman who would eventually become his second wife, singing partner and soul mate June Carter.
The Carter-Cash romance is the real focus of Walk the Line, and that's how the film is most effective — as a simple love story. There's little here of the epic scope of Ray, no real sense of why Cash was important, no attempt to place him in a specific pop-culture historical context.
Joaquin Phoenix does a serviceable job evoking Cash's physical presence, and Reese Witherspoon's perky Carter is a lot of fun to watch (and fun to listen to; she's a surprisingly strong country singer) — but, frankly, this couple could be almost any pair of innocuously attractive lovebirds.
A better title for the movie might have been Johnny and June, because the only line that's really being walked here is the one between the moment the boy first meets the girl and the moment when he finally gets her back.
If Walk the Line leaves you craving a darker, less conventional sort of entertainment, then there's another movie opening locally this week that might be just for you. El Crimen Ferpecto (The Ferpect Crime — that's not a typo) is actually something both darker and lighter, simultaneously comedy and classic film noir, albeit noir run through a screwball blender and relocated almost entirely within the confines of a department store.
Call it retail noir. The director here is Spanish auteur Alex de la Iglesia, an inspired lunatic whose movies are all overthe map, from cult thriller (Perdita Durango) to horror (Day of the Beast) to western (800 Bullets) to sci-fi (Accion Mutante). Iglesia's movies are often outlandishly funny, though, and he always bends whatever genre he's working in to the contours of a uniquely fantastic, pop-art imagination.
Crimen Ferpecto gives us all the basic building blocks of noir — deception, amoral behavior, and, finally, murder — in the decidedly black comedy of a suave, up-and-coming department store manager whose ambitions go horribly wrong. Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) eventually discovers that the only way he can avoid going to prison (for a murder that wasn't exactly his fault) is to hook up with the sole witness to the crime — Lourdes (Monica Cervera), a homely co-worker who also happens to be his secret admirer, and who quickly transforms from wallflower to voracious dominatrix.
Iglesia plays most of this for laughs, from Rafael and Lourdes' forced romance, to a scene in which we learn the proper way of disposing of a corpse with a flaming toupee, to a sequence where the obligatory Family Dinner from Hell gets a new lease on life.
Crimen Ferpecto's noir roots are never far from the surface, though, and not just in the twists and turns of plot. There's noir in the smallest details — just the way a character murmurs the word "accomplice" generates a palpable erotic charge — culminating in the inescapable fate of our anti-hero, an elegant man who only wants to live in an elegant world but winds up surrounded by clowns.
Film Noir is in the air, and even Tampa Bay is getting in on the act. Say hello to "The Shadow in the Fog, the Lady in the Bay," otherwise known as the First Annual St. Petersburg Film Noir Film Festival.
From Nov. 21 through Dec. 10, over 20 classic noirs will be screened at St. Pete's Studio@620, a slate that includes mandatory masterpieces like The Big Sleep and Out of the Past, more obscure gems like Devil Thumbs a Ride and Gun Crazy, and even a handful of stylish foreign variations such as Akira Kurosawa's 1949 Stray Dog. Curators Margaret Murray and Rich Agan have even supplemented the festival with a noir-ish radio play or two and an exhibit of rare pulp paperbacks.
The festival kicks off on Nov. 21 with a 7 p.m. screening of Jules Dassin's elegant caper flick Rififi (7 p.m.), followed on Nov. 22 with a killer double bill of Kiss Me Deadly (7 p.m.) and the always-welcome Double Indemnity (9 p.m.). Rough-and-tumble B-movies are featured on Nov. 23 with Split Second (6 p.m.) and Edgar Ulmer's magnificently lurid Detour (8 p.m.), while future events include an evening curated by noir expert Eddie Muller, who will also speak on noir history (Dec. 3, 6 p.m.) and on homoeroticism in the genre (Dec. 2, 6:30 p.m.). There's more great stuff to follow, so stay tuned.
Studio@620, 620 First Ave. S., St. Petersburg. Single admission tickets are $6, with all-access passes for the entire festival available for $100 or $175 for a pair. For more information call 727-895-6620 or e-mail daellis@tampabay.rr.com.
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2005.