Just last week The Wife and I watched a favorite of ours,
the broadly played, badly underrated 1991 gangster farce Oscar...
It’s an
ensemble piece with a huge cast led by Sylvester Stallone, with great turns by
Peter Riegert, Ornella Muti, Chazz Palminteri, Harry Shearer, Martin Ferrero, Vincent
Spano, William Atherton, Kurtwood Smith, Ken Howard and others. Vets like
Don Ameche, Kirk Douglas and Yvonne De Carlo are in it, and it’s also one of the
very first films of Marisa Tomei.
But probably the biggest reason The Wife and I love it is
Tim Curry’s performance. Curry, who left us this week at the age of 80--just a
day after the passing of the angelic Dolly Parton--plays the cheery linguist
Dr. Thornton Poole, trying to teach Stallone’s gangster “Snaps” Provolone to enunciate
properly. Dr. Poole savors each syllable he speaks with lusty relish, turning
his pupil’s name—"Pro-vo-LONE-ay” into a joyous feast.
I think it’s Curry’s
second-best performance, after Frank in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Or, possibly, it’s Curry’s third-best performance, after his work in 1988’s Pass the Ammo. This way-too-obscure send-up
of televangelism, as far as I can tell, has never had an official DVD release.
It ought to be more of a cult favorite, at least among Tim Curry geeks. If you
fall into that category, seek it out.
Curry plays Ray Porter, who with his wife Darla (the
heavenly Annie Potts) presides over a lucrative tele-church station in
small-town Arkansas. Darla’s a sincere believer whose religious ecstasy tends
to make her shed layers of clothing; Ray’s a priapic lecher and gleeful con
man.
The trouble starts when a trio of rednecks (Bill Paxton, Dennis Burkley and
Glenn Withrow) stage an armed raid on the station with the crazed idea of
getting back the fortune that the grandmother of Paxton’s girlfriend (Linda
Kozlowski) donated to Ray and Darla’s ministry. The plan goes awry and the
station is surrounded by cops, then by a posse of arms-bearing locals, and then
by the Arkansas National Guard. The desperate Paxton and his pals take the
whole station hostage and start grandstanding on TV.
If you’re a Curry aficionado and have never experienced his turn as the
grinning, honey-drawling mountebank Ray Porter, you really should try to hunt
up an old VHS copy of this; you’re in for a treat. But he’s by no means the
whole show. As with Oscar, this is an ensemble piece. Annie Potts is
both delectable and touching as Darla; Burkley and Withrow are a riot as the
good-ol’-boy accomplices and Leland Crooke is endearing as a sympathetic Cajun
sheriff trying to resolve the mess without bloodshed.
The supporting cast includes such venerable veterans as Logan Ramsay, Richard
Paul and Brian Thompson, but the real standout is Anthony Geary, in a
performance that shows what he was capable of when you got him away from soaps,
as Stonewall, the ministry’s sell-out hippie TV director, tolerated by the
ministry’s management for his technical deftness and his willingness to exploit
the visual splendors of Darla. I love the moment when one of the evangelicals
indignantly tells Stonewall he doesn’t believe he’s saved, and Geary replies
"You don’t?” in a delicately wounded tone.
Pass the Ammo is played very broadly, and it’s not without its
detractors--Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide gave it a BOMB rating. But I’ve
always found it trenchant without being mean-spirited. The essential decency of
characters like Darla, the Sherriff and Stonewall, and even the zest and
lovability of the unconscionable Ray, give the movie a generous heart. It
could almost be called inspirational.
It also contains a (very) minor historical footnote, in the character of
the weakling boy-Governor (Jim Holmes). It’s probably the first-ever movie
caricature of the young Bill Clinton, just before people outside the south
began to hear of his existence.
Anyway, as my friend Owen would say, Ave, Magister to
Curry, and also to the glorious Dolly; The Wife and I just watched her in The
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Peace and joy eternal to them both.
