SECOND CHANCE... film noir

. If there was a god, I would never have to say these sad, sad words again?. ?Oh, so, you?ve never heard of Robert Mitchum??


A beautiful disaster.

SECOND CHANCE is a Howard Hughes movie starring Mitchum and a busty woman with puffy, pouty red, red lips? The Weed Smoking Actor God As Much As There Is One loved shooting this picture in Trinidad; the movie creates an exotic city filled with smiling natives selling whatever, in crowded streets filled with tough talking men and women who always yield; a Shangri la where the maiter?d?s are more informed than the local police. He got good weed there, his wife was at home so he could do any woman he wanted, and he loved to drink and sing and was welcomed into the local music scene, where he gained his life long love for Calypso music, which he actually introduced into the US on an album that he ended up being forced to sing on when everyone he elicited claimed that Mitchum was the better mambo singer. He could sing. On the album, which I have (as well as the DVD and all things Mitchum, due to M.?s particular form of geekiness), Mitchum sings like he is a native. He recorded this album not as a white guy doing his interpretation, but as an actor trying to convey how the natives were singing calypso. He gets across how much he enjoyed getting drunk and listening to the music, smoking a j and holding the shapely, soft ship of the night in his arms.

This Movie Second Chance also has a young, mean Jack Palance going up against a thirty something Mitchum face. The Mitch is at his zenith during this time, physical appearance wise at least. His ?duck walk? strut is at maximum leopard like coolness. Palance is so mean that the little kids shouldn?t see this one. The violence is stark in this Hughes Product, with a man beating his wife in public, then later falling down cliffs and bouncing bloodily to his death == just as Jack Palance does later, when the Mitch finally kicks his ass, on top of a cable car strung between the peaks of two mountainous peaks in Trinidad. The last words spoken in this movie are, ?What a beautiful disaster,? and come from the lips of the operator of a cable car, who is among those who have just been rescued from their original cable car, which they are watching do a deadly bounce down the cliff ? which is, oddly enough, the third deadly bounce down this cliff in the last twenty minutes of the movie?. for reasons inexplicable to me and more than likely you.

?What a beautiful disaster.? HMMM???? What does it mean when this phrase ends a movie? I like the idea of this line being spoke over the dead as their lives are remembered.

I hope some kid will have the decency to spray paint this on my tombstone one day. The list of phrases that I wish to have spray painted on my tomb is another of my lists that is ?seemingly? ?getting too long to be stored in the apartment any longer. ? At least that is M?s take on what she refuses to acknowledge are sacred piles of parchment? actually, M. has been particularly harsh with her censorship of my work ever since she spent a horrified morning last summer going through all the lists and charts and general source material and other data that I had gathered while doing my study, Bikini Usage At The Jarvis Beach,--which she still to this day sees as nothing more than, ?Criminal Invasion of Privacy,? and other assorted crimes.


The moral of the story is, obviously, that you should be sterilized if you start developing an interest in my writing.




.eal from me and you will be cursed in such a way that your hands turn into worthless, jelly fish like appendages that sting your intimates. Or sued or something bad like that...