First, because it reminded us of that wonderful, long ago time when movie studios produced lots and lots of medium budgeted movies each year......in as wide a variety of subject matter as possible. They weren't 180 million budgeted CGI behemoths designed to pound you into jelly with explosions and special effects. They didn't live or die based on their first Friday night box office receipts. They didn't attempt to establish a franchise series, threatening you with four or five more identical, monstrously awful sequels.
The movies we speak of, modest in their budgets and ambitions, simply wanted to tell you a good enough story to make you want to spend a pleasant two hours watching it....
And that's what we have in "The Flim-Flam Man", a breezy, rambunctious little rural comedy energized by George C.Scott's play-it-to-the-rafters work as the title character and Jerry Goldsmith's flavorful, slyly cornpone score....
Scott is Mordecai Jones, a wily old codger who's spent a lifetime running elaborate scams on backwoods suckers in the deep South. He also usually ends up running for the nearest freight train, one step ahead of the county sheriff and the outraged rubes who've been finagled out of their cash. You can tell that Scott's having a grand time with this role, outfitted in ridiculous 'old guy' theatrical makeup complete with bushy, flyaway eyebrows. And the film's best asset: its glorious line-up of character actors playing Scott's victims and foils......Harry Morgan, Albert Salmi, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin, Woodrow Parfrey,Jack Albertson and Alice Ghostly.
Mordecai finds a new partner-protege in Curly Treadaway (Michael Sarrrazin) a young Army recruit gone AWOL after punching his damn Yankee drill sergeant. To the old con man's delight, Curly has a gift for improvising scams himself, But the boy proves ultimately unqualified for a criminal life.....he's afflicted with a streak of decency, a guilty conscience, and newly found love with the beautiful daughter( Sue Lyon, Kubrick's 'Lolita') of a family whose car he and Scott stole and destroyed. (This slapstick getaway sequence, directed by veteran stuntmaster Yakima Canutt, is the film's showstopper, with Scott and Sarrazin comically demolishing both the car and the small town they're racing to escape....we like that it doesn't exhaust you with massive destruction, the scene just wants to make you laugh.)
That brings us to the second reason "The Flim-Flam Man" floated back into the BQ's memory......in its lengthy, witty sequences where the fast talking Mordecai bamboozles his naive, willing victims into parting with their money. Funny stuff.....until we began to see it as a microcosm of what happened for real last year, to the entire country. Only instead of one or two townsfolk sucked in by a blustering, elderly con man, millions got taken for a ride.........
. The showpiece of the movie's shakedowns was a marvelously complex 'lost wallet' deception perpetrated on a gullible farmer played to perfection by Slim Pickens. As we watched George C.Scott, with Sarrazin's help, work his snaky charm on Pickens, tempting him with a phony fat check found inside the bogus lost wallet........we couldn't help thinking of Pickens as the quintessential Trump voter, promised the moon and the stars, but left with nothing but the hot air expelled in all the false promises made. Though fifty years separates us from this movie,a gibbering con man is still a con man.....whether he sports sprouting eyebrows in a movie....or a glowing orange face in the White House.
But politics aside, by all means enjoy "The Flim-Flam Man" for its basic, simple pleasures....George C.Scott's lovable rogue, the equally brilliant supporting cast chasing after him and Jerry Golsmith's twang 'n harmonica music as cake icing. We'll sneak in 4 stars (****) for the character who bills himself as the "Master of back stabbin', cork screwin' and dirty dealing".....come to think of it, that same phrase could apply today to a more recent con man............
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