Golden lady

After watching and writing about Robert Altman movies, Dennis Cozzalio took a breather to post a couple of random photos of Angie Dickinson on his blog. Turning to gaze innocently if not longingly at this lovely lady after the mental aerobics of Altman seemed perfectly natural, for ultimately what purpose does she serve other than to let us know all is right with the world?

    She was never a huge star, and handled the movies, television and fame with equal and casual aplomb. ‘Everyone,’ however, seemed to know her in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This could make her appear less an actress than a celebrity, but even on that level she came up short. Angie flowered in an era that went gaga over smoldering, busty exotics and amazons: Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Senta Berger, Anita Ekberg. But wisely and logically, she never tried to compete. Hers is a soft sexuality, warm and genuine, merry narrow-eyes and a slight lisp, the promise of a pleasant time in the sack and blueberry pancakes in the morning.

    My first conscious awareness came in 1968 when, at the age of ten, I was visiting relatives in York, PA. Angie was co-starring with Burt Reynolds in a western comedy called Sam Whiskey. I didn’t go to see the movie, but found myself mesmerized by the ad in the local newspaper, which looked like the one below, only a lot smaller and in black and white:

    For the sake of this Blog-a-Thon — AngieThon, as it were, though one toyed with the idea of Angie DickinThon — I top-stacked Sam Whiskey on my Netflix queue along with eight or nine titles from her hodgepodge oeuvre. Fortunately, my thirty-eight-year wait fostered no high hopes. Sam Whiskey is innocuous fluff, part of the paving that led to Reynolds’s success, and little more than a standard made-for-TV movie that finagled a limited theatrical release. By the same token, it’s typical of the modest work she’d grown used to and would continue with in a subdued career that’s still going after five decades. On screen for a total of perhaps fifteen minutes parceled out over an hour and a half, she serves as a delicate grounding for Reynolds’s ne’er-do-well. In the hands of Natalie Wood, the same part could have been cute, bawdy and sizzling; with Raquel Welch, a steamy parody of eroticism. But Angie possessed a rare balance of all of those things under deft and gentle, almost maternal, control.

    She spent a lot of time in ensemble casts: part of the terrorist cell in Andrew L. Stone’s frantic Cry Terror! (1958); a charter member of the Rat Pack in Ocean’s Eleven (1960) — she’d later do several of the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts on TV; somewhat helpless as Brando’s wife (and flagrantly upstaged by the Confederate sleaze) in The Chase (1966); faring better with comedy in The Art of Love (1965), relaxed with James Garner and Dick Van Dyke.

Above: 24-year-old Angie (second from left) in an unbilled appearance in Tennessee’s Partner (1955) with Rhonda Fleming (center).

    Angie was trim and attractive but somewhat bland as the femme fatale in Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964). Initially made for TV but released theatrically because of its violence, it’s an engaging rehash of concepts from Robert Siodmak’s superior 1946 version which, in turn, was derived from a Hemingway story. Angie plays the Ava Gardner part — a startling contrast in itself, the hot mother and the whore — but women were never Siegel’s forte, and she soon blends in with a band of crooks including John Cassavetes, Norman Fell and Ronald ‘Dutch’ Reagan (in his last film) as the bourgeois kingpin who “has no problem with larceny.” Closing in are a couple of hitmen: Clu Gulager and Lee Marvin, doing his bizarre spider-walk at the end.

    (The Killers wasn’t the only film Angie made with Reagan. In 1955, the twenty-four-year-old actress was unbilled as one of the girls working in Rhonda Fleming’s ‘Marriage Market’ in Allan Dwan’s feisty Tennessee’s Partner, with the future President as ‘Cowpoke.’)

    She was fortunate to hook up with Marvin again three years later in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967). A key film of the decade (and still quite riveting), it works as a critique of America’s post-WWII nouveau riche as well as an existential parable chiseled out of the gangster genre. Given that, Angie, second billed under Marvin, plays less a person than a controlled figure in an engineered landscape constantly shifting from amorality, consumerism, vanity and isolation. One scene, in which Angie beats Marvin for real, is a frightening display of her ferocity and his unflappable resistance, a condition Boorman believes has been foisted upon his character by the forked-tongue of corporate bureaucracy.

Above: Angie beats the hell out of Lee in Point Blank (click to enlarge).

    Angie also worked for Sam Fuller, dubbing Sarita Montiel in Run of the Arrow (1957) and playing the half-caste ‘Lucky Legs’ in China Gate (1957). “[Daryl F.] Zanuck approved of my choice of Angie Dickinson for the lead, even though she was an unknown,” Fuller wrote in his autobiography, A Third Face. “She had a strong presence in the tests we did with her. With her high cheekbones and slanted eyes, Angie passed for a Eurasian. And those legs of hers stretched all the way across a CinemaScope screen.”

    Those legs were instrumental when the gravy train arrived in the form of Police Woman, her popular and trendy cop show that ran from 1974 to 1978. Angie’s weekly stint as Pepper Anderson brought the fame that eluded her in the movies. Taken into consideration, her ninety-one one-hour episodes equals the combined running times of forty-five feature films, all made in the space of four years.

    After all is said and done, Angie’s career is framed by two particularly revealing films, Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959) and Steve Carver’s Big Bad Mama (1974). There isn’t much one can say about the latter, the epitome of a Roger Corman-produced drive-in movie, other than its gutsy display of forty-three-year-old Angie stone naked in a couple of eye-popping scenes. Especially the tryst she has with co-star William Shatner, who looks rather uncomfortable running his hands over her body. Of the face and figure, though, all one can do is marvel at the perfection. Angie in her forties easily topped Angie in her twenties.

    She has limited but essential screen time in Rio Bravo, Hawks’s comical observation of political and social folly. Sheriff John Wayne watches over a small Western town’s miscreants, its wealthy villains and flawed working class, with Angie stepping off the stagecoach to become his voice of reason. She plays Feathers to Duke’s Chance (and Dean Martin’s Dude, Walter Brennan’s Stumpy and Ricky Nelson’s Colorado), her breathless, apprehensive delivery feeding the questions Chance should be asking himself. Feathers is another of the director’s fascinating females, prone to smirking over an unspoken, private joke, sexually available to whom she chooses, mature enough to realize the power she wields over men. Angie’s visibly uneasy in the role, which may have been by design — in relation to Wayne, a more domineering or assured presence could have made Feathers less persuasive. Inherently beautiful, when she repeatedly questions even her own motives the character becomes oddly endearing. It may be Angie’s finest performance.

Above: Feathers in Rio Bravo, with Duke (click to enlarge).

Surf the AngieThon:
(Additional links will be added throughout the day)

Better Living Through Television

Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee

Cult Clash 2.0

Film Ick

Greenbriar Picture Shows (Excellent stills!)

Inisfree

The Ongoing Cinematic Education of Steven Carlson

Richard Gibson

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

That Little Round-Headed Boy

Buy Angie at Amazon:

Trailer for Big Bad Mama, voiceover by Dick Miller: