Sam Peckinpah and Ben Templesmith Ride Again...in the rain.
You may not think that rain is an auspicious start to the weekend, but if you lived in Los Angeles, you would. You know what else is auspicious? Getting to see Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch for the first time in your life at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood on a 70mm print.
Sure, the sound on the 1993 print was a little wonky in places and every other reel change, the projectionist overshot the frame, but who cares? All those over-the-hill man's men trying to eek out one last score before calling it a career, and attempting to do so without losing their dignity or betraying their code of ethics. If this movie were remade today (why isn't anyone doing that? I'm surprised...) they'd cast a bunch of guys who were way too young and comely in the parts of Bill Holden and Ernest Borgnine. Not to mention every single woman in the movie was, how to put this kindly, used up looking and past her prime. (Maybe with the exception of one or two.) The grittiness of the thing and the harsh realism of the casting lends the film a great deal of its '70s era charm. (Yes, yes; I know it came out in 1969). The make-up in the gun-play sequences is primitive, but the action set pieces are first rate, my favorite being the interception of the train with the shipment of U.S. army munitions. That kind of train robbery scene harks right back to the earliest commercial cinema in this country, and Peckinpah delivers his version of it with tension and even emotion (!). There's a level of male camaraderie in this picture that seeps out of every frame. I almost felt like the undercover girl at a stag party, or in the room for cigars and cognac when I should've been discussing the latest fashions with the ladies in the drawing room -- and not just because the Cinematheque's audience tends to skew toward the older male. It's the way Bill Holden and Ernest Borgnine look at each other. It's the way Holden stands up to the more mutinous of his men when they want to ditch certain members of the team. But Holden is all or nothing, and not afraid of commitment, at least not to his buddies or his sense of honor.
After the show, the rain was starting to come down. I hemmed and hawed in my mind over whether or not to go to the Ben Templesmith show at the Secret Headquarters. My compromise with myself, since I'd left my car umbrella in my gym bag at my apartment, was to swing by the comic store and if there was parking, I'd stay. If not, I'd call it a night. Well, there was a single rock star parking space right in front of the store, so I went in. The party was in full swing, with original drawings of Templesmith's -- most from 30 Days of Night, but also from other works -- up on the walls. I picked up the first trade volume of Fell, and chatted up Mr. Templesmith (& and his wife Lorelei) for a bit after he signed my copy. Knowing absolutely nothing biographical about the man, I asked him what part of England he hailed from, only to be greeted with some faint grumbling. He's from Australia, it turns out, but he cut me some slack because his dad's English, he said, and so his accent's a bit mixed-up. He reassured me, adamantly, that everything I know about Australians from Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin is a lie. He also gave me the unfiltered truth about how Australians truly felt about the death of the Crocodile Hunter. Let's just say, not sad. (Harsh!) He says he's been in L.A. only a few days on this trip, but that he's planning to move to San Diego in the near future. I asked if it was to be close to Comic Con. No, he laughed, it's where his wife lives. I asked Lorelei how they met. At Comic Con, of course! She was working for IDW back then, and pulled a late shift, covering for someone on a day she wasn't even supposed to work. This one guy kept lingering around when all she wanted to do was close up her booth and go home. Guess who it was? Ben. (Awww.) I finished my complimentary Corona and headed home to hunker down with my comics and maybe a nice cup of tea.
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