Pornhound Goes to the Movies
52 Pick-up (1986)

d. John Frankenheimer; pr. Yoram Globus, Menahem Golan; scr. Elmore Leonard, John Steppling; novel. Elmore Leonard; ph. Jost Vacano; m. Gary Chang; ed. Robert F. Shugrue; cast. Roy Scheider, Ann-Margret, John Glover, Clarence Williams III, Robert Trebor, Doug McClure, Vanity (110 mins)

Director John Frankenheimer was in the 1960s the golden boy of Kennedy-era political thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May.  

His visual style was slick and inventive, his humour pointed and his narrative strength engagingly playful.  By his mid-20s he was the most important talent in live television drama and his films were hybrids of docudrama realism and grotesque distortion. By the late 1970s though, he was reduced to helming the mainstream monster movie Prophecy with ludicrous makeup effects by Carlo Rambaldi; and without any decent scripts coming his way he soon turned to booze.  In an alcoholic haze he went to Japan to try his hand at a little martial arts action flick in The Challenge but although the film starred the original Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune, any reference to Kurosawa and the Samurai film genre was at the tail end of a whiskey bottle.  The former star of the American critical scene, Frankeheimer hit a low point in The Challenge.  The director was a workhorse though and after the giddy excess of The Holcroft Covenant, he re-bounded with 52 Pick-Up, a gritty crime thriller now on DVD through MGM/UA.

This time he had cool source material: a novel by crime writer Elmore Leonard.  Leonard had made a career writing crime fiction with lurid, seedy characters and a smartly cynical wit.  He was the next stage in genre writing, taking the “hard-boiled” school of writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain into the contemporary street. 

Like the street, Leonard was wise and looking to make money.  He’d scripted a Western, Joe Kidd with Clint Eastwood, but was itching to re-envision the crime thriller by way of film noir gone straight to the porn ghetto.  Frankenheimer liked the ear for dialogue and the amoral glee of Leonard; and producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan were giving him creative control.  Golan and Globus headed Cannon Films, an Israeli-funded action B-movie production house that was looking to recruit better directorial talent and in Frankenheimer they had a true veteran.  In the 1980s, Cannon Films were unavoidable though the mainstream critics detested them.

Former French Connection sidekick Roy Scheider stars in 52 Pick-Up as a middle-class businessman.  Married to an aspiring politician (the still sultry Ann Margret) Scheider is feeling his middle-age and fucking a young woman in her early 20s.  Trouble is: her friends have been secretly filming them fuck and are using the footage to blackmail Scheider: give us the cash or we’ll tell your wife! 

Scheider won’t pay.  The girl is tied to a chair, a wooden board placed in front of her.  A gun is tied to a stand, a string around its trigger.  The trigger is pulled.  Bullet after bullet shatters the board and hits the girl.  And it’s all on camera.  In slow motion.  The snuff film of her death is shown to Scheider with an added catch.  The gun that killed her is his gun and his prints are on it.  The coat lain over the girl’s corpse is his coat.  If he doesn’t pay, he’s going down for a murder rap.  But Scheider’s clever.  He goes after the blackmailers, trailing them through a world of peep show houses, porn theatres and willing call-girls.  But as a businessman, he’s out of funds – he can only raise $52,000: its going to be a case of a 52 pick-up or nothing.

52 Pick-Up is pulp fiction.  It’s a mid 1980s mainstream smut-drenched thriller for those whose minds belong in the grindhouse gutter.  Quentin Tarantino elevated the seedy, amoral vulgarity of pulp fiction to commercial success but Tarantino is too slyly tongue-in-cheek.  When Tarantino got around to adapting Elmore Leonard in Jackie Brown, the result was smart and crisp but it was still with the self-reflective distance of Tarantino’s video store clerk enthusiasm for trash fiction genre film.  It was all cool to be sure, but the stylized hipness lacked the cold, hard grit of the genre, the sense of amoral glee and the bitter cost of getting in too deep.  52 Pick-Up is just that: film noir pulp fiction as sleazy as mainstream got in the 1980s.  It’s the real deal.  Frankenheimer was always morally ambiguous and in 52 Pick-Up he gets to wallow in seediness for the fun of it: villains Chris Glover and Clarence Williams III are radiant lowlifes and Glover relishes the character, making this his finest work.  Glover’s portrayal of the blackmailing pornographer is a delight in smarmy amorality, the joy of a smart man turned bad man for the fun of it and surrounding himself in young snatch, his camera (and Frankenheimer’s) partying with naked porn stars.

Pornographers in mainstream films are usually degenerates, the most recent example being Peter Stormare as the snuff artiste of 8MM, but Glover brings out the jovial side of amorality and he is a delight to watch.  Frankenheimer sees the humour in the interplay between the kidnappers and enjoys the characterizations of the villains in this film. 

But, Frankenheimer makes sure there is no moral core in 52 Pick Up: it’s a thriller of moral relativism and the director is as intent to see it from Glover’s perspective as he is Scheider’s.  With often hilarious character work, authentic pornhound atmosphere and the deliberate control of a masterly story-teller, 52 Pick Up is a trip, a revelation of the attraction to sexual decadence that Frankenheimer first pondered in the brilliant sci-fi tinged Seconds but was only truly freed when the director stopped trying to make “art” and staged a Berlin cabaret-driven fetish-sex festival as the scene of a shoot-out in the pulp delirium of The Holcroft Covenant.  Indeed, the trio of villains in 52 Pick-Up are so interesting and comical to Frankenheimer that he would rework them in his last film, Reindeer Games, re-teaming Clarence Williams III with Gary Sinise and Danny Trejo for a sly black comedy.

For the grindhouse-loving, dope-smoking, acid-happy pornhound that I was, 52 Pick-Up was the right stuff, the good shit.

It’s got enough film noir heritage to make it worthy of serious critical analysis, but this was film noir brought to the porn ghetto.  Blackmail.  Peep show booths.  Snuff movies.  And as a tits ‘n ass curio 52 Pick Up has a rare treat: in a brief role is Vanity, 80s pop-rock superstar Prince’s former girlfriend.  I couldn’t resist this one.  I smoked a cone of some good hydroponic and watched lustfully as Roy Scheider entered a peep show house and took snapshots of a topless Vanity as she spread her legs, writhed and answered questions that just might get her killed in the next scene.  Frankenheimer knows the lure of the lifestyle he depicts and rewards the dedicated dope fiend with a female flesh filled B-movie thriller about characters increasingly stripped of their morality; there finding sheer joy for Glover but sad self-awareness for Scheider.  I wanted to know what Scheider was willing to do to get out of the situation and how Glover would respond: this film hooked me in with its story-telling skill and amoral premise.  As far as Elmore Leonard on screen was concerned, 52 Pick Up was the pinnacle: subsequent big Hollywood hits like Get Shorty were commercialized crap in comparison.

Frankenheimer’s protagonists are often wounded men.  Driven, dedicated and professional, they fight to be the best at what they do. 

In 52 Pick Up, Scheider begins on top of the world.  His business is doing well, his wife is successful and he’s getting a little cock action, playing daddy to a girl just out of her teens.  The blackmail wounds him: and as it wounds him, it purifies him, focusing his energies into saving his ass from ruin.  But this is film noir and fate is conspiring against him.  And time is running out.  To save himself he must forego conventional morality and confront head-on men who will kill for money and fuck for pleasure.  He’s going underground.  Frankenheimer’s narrative is tight, lean and dead-on the nerve endings of an adulterer re-gaining control over adverse circumstance, along the way feeling the dangerous thrill of masculinity’s capacity for amoral survival. 52 Pick Up, like many of Frankenheimer’s thrillers is about discovering what a man is capable of under extreme pressure.  But of all his films, it is 52 Pick Up that delights in the temptations of the porn ghetto and has all that the grindhouse-bred pornhound needs to get stoned, sit back and enjoy.

52 Pick-Up makes for a solid, protracted high.  With some good bud and a bong to top up with just as Vanity makes her topless appearance this is a cruise-control sleazy thriller with twists and turns that continually engage.  The DVD boasts an effective but functional anamorphic transfer though the lack of special features is disappointing. 

Still, for fans of seedy crime thrillers, it makes for a worthwhile collectible.