Peter Fonda's cool Captain America rides across America with the wired Billy (Dennis Hopper), encountering hippies, rednecks and Jack Nicholson as dipso lawyer George Hanson. It looks as mythically beautiful as it did back in '69. And Hanson's campfire speech about Amerika is more chillingly relevant than ever.
In Arthur Penn's 1958 film The Left-Handed Gun, Billy The Kid (Paul Newman) was portrayed as a neurotic, self-destructive teen rebel who behaved like James Dean with a six-gun. Penn threw in the framing device of having a journalist follow Billy through his career of crime. Little Big Man (1970) also features a journalist looking to embroider the facts, but this time the writer meets his match in the shape of the wizened, 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman hidden behind several layers of make-up).
Yes, on tuesday, June 13, 1978, voodoo rockabilly avatars The Cramps (in their greatest line-up, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy backed by Nick Knox and Byron Gregory) rolled into the recreation room of California's Napa State Mental Hospital, to play for the residents. Don't ask how this was ever allowed.
A concept album of sorts, the second solo release from the Mekons founder and Chicago-expat charts the rise and demise of honky-tonker Lofty Deeds as a metaphor for US history. Like all things Langford, though, it's not heavy-handed or portentous, the music rollicking like a midnight special braced against the hard wind of his uniquely British delivery.
Describing itself as "the evil twin to the ecstatically decadent Boogie Nights soundtrack", the merits of this collection dwarf even Val Kilmer's (it says here) 13-inch penis. Okay, so he was playing porn legend John Holmes. But we don't even want to think about the method acting. Instead, let's explain why this soundtrack is so excellent. It's very simple: most of the songs they've chosen are classics. As opposed to the tired drek clueless movie producers compiling soundtracks usually think are classics (Dido, The Troggs).
