We pity poor Dillon......since the movie director best suited for his exaggerated comic book goulash of gallows yocks and cool violence, Quentin Tarantino, was still only 11 years old at the time....
For "Prime Cut", he got social satirist Michael Ritchie, who maintained an efficiently deadpan style throughout (covered by the BQ in a previous post)......Ritchie skirted the outer edges of comic book hyperbole without ever truly embracing it......(but we dearly loved his heartland/barnyard shootouts....)
In case anyone didn't understand his intentions, Dillon went for the full Pop Art gusto with "99 and 44/100% Dead"......it's pure, dopey, unadulterated fantasy.....you can think of it as an early, primitive version of the "Sin City" movies, only with real cars, buildings and backgrounds in front of the actors......
This time Dillon's funhouse-mirror gangster tropes fell into the hands of director John Frankenheimer, who could never figure out how to balance the cartoonish humor with the piles of dead bodies. (In later interviews, the director bitterly disowned the movie, claiming he knew it wasn't working after a few weeks into production....)
At least a few of the creative participants definitely saw it as a farce.......composer Henry Mancini supplied
a jaunty, jokey underscore for film's remarkable 'bookend' scenes.......a gangland underwater cemetery featuring men and women of varying ages, depending on their state of decomposition, anchored to the bottom of the bay with traditional cement blocks around their feet,,,,,,the sequences deftly display what the film was trying for......the blending of the comic and the wildly gruesome......
Most of the cast plays it too cool for school, including Richard Harris as the film's hitman hero Harry Crown. Harris indicates he's about to start blasting away with his twin automatics by whipping off and collapsing his plus-sized Aviator glasses.......(he does this about 180 times before the film's done, kind of like Clark Kent tearing off his dress shirt to reveal the big red 'S'.....)
But there's a few jokers in the deck........Bradford Dillman, as twitchy gangster chief Big Eddie, carries on as if he's Jerry Lewis pretending to be Al Capone. Big Eddie's chief minion ups the crazy even more......Claw Zuckerman (a pop-eyed Chuck Connors), whose metal hand accepts a variety of attachments, including knives, guns, a wine bottle opener and artificial flowers.....
Sounds like fun, huh? Not so much. Frankenheimer labors to find the right tone and frequently lets the pace lag......which is deadly for a movie as nutty as this.......you don't want to give an audience any time to think too much about what's unfolding in front of them....
Looking at big studio fare today (multimillion-budgeted comic book movies), makes the failures of Dillon's two scripts brutally ironic....."99 And 44/100% Dead" sank lower than the film's cement shoe'd, aquatically buried gangsters and molls......but Robert Dillon's skewed vision of larger-than-life hoods perforating each other with lead certainly lives on. 2 stars (**).....with one star for that talented collection of glub glub corpses at the start and finish.......boy, can those people hold their breath or what........
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