They Only Kill Their Masters - 1972

"They Only Kill Their Masters" - 1972
Dir. by James Goldstone - 1 hr. 37 min.

Original Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

You know, sometimes I'm wrong about things.  When I was scouring the TCM listings late one night, I came across a movie starring James Garner and a dog, and I thought to myself that it sounded funny.  But I was dreadfully wrong.  It was not funny, and it wasn't entertaining, either.  I hadn't bargained for a lame small-town cop story, nor a ton of Simon & Garfunkel knock-off acoustic guitar noodling, nor my needing two sittings to finish the movie.

Let's begin with the premise that Abel Marsh (James Garner) is a crappy small-town cop with crappy instincts and no budget to work with.  Actually, just think back to watching "Jaws," but without the whole killer shark angle.  A dead woman turns up in the surf, discovered by a Doberman Pinscher, whom everyone immediately assumes killed the woman.  But a week later, they figure out that she had been drowned instead, and we have an official murder on our hands.  And since the dog, Murphy, is no longer a suspect, one of the women at the vet's office, Kate (Katharine Ross) guilts Abel into adopting the dog, and sweetens the pot by engaging in some steamy business with him.

I ordinarily start off by trying to say something complimentary about a movie, but I don't have much of anything to say about "They Only Kill Their Masters."  I'm generally pro-James Garner, and that was enough to get me to watch this in the first place, but even he seems bored by the conundrum he's in.  This decade of film is littered with fantastic "bad cop" movies (you could probably think of half a dozen of them that are pretty much essential-viewing without breaking a sweat), and this film takes that scenario, and then promptly forgets to pile on the main character, or even to make him that bad of a guy to begin with.  Abel isn't a "bad cop," he's just not very good at what he does, and that's not even exploited for laughs.  He gets a hunch, follows it, and then discovers that it's wrong and moves on to his next hunch.  I think that happens at least four times over the course of this film.  At the least, it's inefficient police-work, and for a cash-strapped small-town police force, that ought to be a matter of concern.

Beyond that, the tone is all weird.  Some of the people that Abel is investigating are basically swingers, and I think we're supposed to judge that harshly.  Abel has some weird, judgmental offhand remarks (there was one in particular, patronizingly making sure that he's got the nomenclature for a menage-a-trois right), partially motivated by the small-town folks being shocked by big-city behavior (the only real difference being that people in cities don't try very hard to cover up what they're doing).  At the same time, Abel is banging Kate like a barista trying to shake loose your smoothie from the blender, but I guess that's okay.  But instead of provoking some sort of moral outrage, these kinds of moments just come off lukewarm, and pretty much without meaning beyond making Abel look like he hates everyone around him, but doesn't have the courage to do anything about it.  And there's this dog, which doesn't even have the acting chops to command his own scenes.

Look, "They Only Kill Their Masters" is weak.  Even if you like James Garner, and are amused by the idea of him interacting with a dog on-screen, or even if you like bad cop movies, this isn't going to do the trick.  The only thing this movie succeeded at doing was making me wonder why I didn't just queue up a couple of episodes of "The Rockford Files" instead.

1 / 5 - TV (HD)

Fritz the Cat - 1972

"Fritz the Cat" - 1972
Dir. by Ralph Bakshi - 1 hr. 18 min.

Teaser Trailer

"Fritz the Cat" is, at this point, more of an important film than a good one.  The lessons it has to offer have been largely absorbed: adult-oriented animation is it's own genre now.  At the time "Fritz" was made, that was pretty far from the case.  The proof of that lies in it's pulling an "X" rating.

"Fritz" is an anthropomorphic movie, based on a R. Crumb comic.  Fritz, the character, is a disaffected NYU student, a writer longing to live life to the fullest.  He's a part-time musician, full-time tail-chaser, occasional dope-smoker.  Most of the movie is a satire of Fritz and his lifestyle, pretty much everyone except Fritz can see through his aspirations.  He accidentally burns down his dormitory because his roomies are immersed in their studies instead of carousing, he goes to a crow bar because he wants to understand the plight of the crows, after a night of smoking weed and running around with a hooker, Fritz incites a riot that sees the crow that had befriended him get shot by the police (while he escapes untouched).  One of his girlfriends tracks him down and offers to drive them out to San Francisco, and to get a secretarial job while Fritz works on his poetry.  After that falls apart, Fritz falls in with a radical anti-establishment group, and finally realizes that it's all a load.

So where did "Fritz" earn it's X-rating?  By today's standards, there's a lot of sexual content.  Today's adult-oriented cartoons seem to largely ignore sexuality, lean heavily on swearing, and offer a wink and a nudge toward drug use.  Here, all three are front and center.  It doesn't feel out of place, director Ralph Bakshi offers a coarse world full of people concerned only with physical pleasure, and in that regard it nails it's target perfectly.  It would be difficult to satirize the 60's with any insight at all without confronting this behavior, so I didn't really feel the material was prurient or solely for titillation.  So I guess it's a matter of taste.  I wouldn't claim that "Fritz" is for everyone, but it didn't feel like the controversial material was there without purpose.

My favorite scene in the whole movie doesn't have any controversial material in it, however.  When Fritz's New Yawker girlfriend decides that it's time to eat in the middle of their road trip, Fritz goes off on this tangent about how he wants to find a greasy spoon diner, so that he can talk with the truck drivers about what life on the road is really like (as if they'd give him the time of day).  He gets very excited about the idea, and she spots a place and makes a beeline for it.  They find themselves in a Howard Johnson, Fritz looking like he'd rather kill himself than eat there.  Post-meal, the girlfriend says something about always being able to rely on Howard Johnson for a good steak.  It's a sharp piece of business, delineating how much their expectations out of life differ, and foreshadowing their blow-up later in the film.

"Fritz" is pretty interesting - I'm always fascinated by low-budget animated films come to be.  It's a trailblazing film, although when you're satirizing something very current, time isn't always going to be as kind as you'd like.  It's difficult to imagine that today's crop of adult-oriented cartoons would exist without "Fritz" existing, if only for the idea that cartoons didn't need to be for children.  Plus, if you ever wanted to see a cat try to hump a crow, "Fritz the Cat" has it covered.

3 / 5 - NF Streaming