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Arbogast, Prizzi's Honor, Misery and "Fargo Season Five, Episode 8" (SPOILER for the Fargo Show)

posted 4 months ago by roger1 (2351)
13 replies | jump to latest

I've been watching the TV series "Fargo" which is "based" on "Fargo" the movie like " Bates Motel" was based on "Psycho"(not well, exploitatively) but which is rather a barn burner of suspense thanks largely to a performance by Joh Hamm of Mad Men as a truly horrific, cruel-woman beating murderer of a fascist South Dakota county sheriff. He's AWFUL and my whole reason for watching this one-season series is to see him die good. (Hitchock's Bob Rusk beat raped and killed women, too --I wanted to see HIM die, but, no dice.)

Anyway, this is a spoiler for but one scene of Fargo Season 5 -- just from episode 8, but it rather had me smiling, for several reasons having to do with several movies.

The set-up(basics): Evil Sheriff Jon Hamm is holding a woman prisoner in the barn behind his house. Can she escape before he kills her?

Through a series of coincidences, a "hero" has come looking for her:a male lawyer (prominent in the story for other reasons) who has white hair, a matching white eyepatch and is played by one-time "cute funny little guy" Dave Foley(Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio).

Our one-eyed white haired lawyer -- named Danish Graves -- thinks he can reason with Hamm's evil Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) in his house, in his home office, as Hamm sits behind his desk and Graves hovers over him.

Even after Tillman produces a big handgun from his drawer and lays it menacingly on the desk, Graves the Lawyer keeps thinking he can cut a deal with Hamm to release the captured woman.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

"if you are so smart," says smug menacing sheriff Jon Hamm to the white haired(with white eye patch to match) lawyer Danish Graves(Dave Foley) after shooting him in the stomach, and then walking around his desk to aim the same handgun at Foley's head and shoot him, "why are you so dead?"

There were about 10 seconds from Hamm's first line to his second and in those 10 seconds, I called the second line. I guess it was a somewhat predictable line on the one hand, but it is also from a 1985 movie called "Prizzi's Honor" with Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner.

The context is different in "Prizzi's Honor" :

Jack plays a Mafia henchman/hit man and Kathleen plays a free lance hit woman. They get married, but not before Jack has(for business, not jealoussy) killed the older man who had "kept" Kathleen. She is bragging about that man and how smart he was, to Jack. And Jack slowly drawls, in his famous stereophonic syrupy voice:

"If he's so fucking smart...why is he so fucking dead?"

Methinks a Fargo writer saw "Prizzi's Honor."

There is another famous movie echoed in that murder scene, and yet another movie after that one.

The movie is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho(1960), which famously has a psycho killer called Mrs. Bates killing embezzler Janet Leigh in a motel shower...but somehwat less famously has that same Mrs. Bates later killing the private investigator who has come to find the missing Leigh and the missing money.

The detective is Martin Balsam's Arbogast of course, and before he dies he confronts motel keeper Norman Bates about the disappeared Leigh, breaks down his lies, heads off to the old house to "meet" Mrs. Bates...and gets slashed in the face, a staircase fall, and stabbed to death on the floor as his fate.

As Alfred Hitchcock said in his 1960 trailer for Psycho: "The victim...had no idea of the kind of people he was confronting."

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

Flash forward 64 years to Fargo Season 5. Attorney Danish Graves, too, "has no idea about the type of person he is confronting" (Hamm proves pretty much a psychopath in this scene.) Graves, too has come after a missing woman who(he has been warned) is prisoner on Hamm's property. And Graves, too, makes the truly fatal mistake of coming to Hamm's house alone, with no back -up(just like Arbogast did in Psycho.)

When this episode made its way slowly to the confrontation between Foley and Hamm, I blurted out "Arbogast" to my watching companion, because "Arbogast"" -- a TYPE -- has travelled through decades of screen thrillers -- the person(often an investigator or cop, but not always) who does his job too well but thinks it through too little, and comes alone to confront people of whom "he has no idea of the type he is dealing with."

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

In "Misery," made 30 years after Psycho in 1990, a rather kindly old Colorado snow country sheriff(Richard Farnsworth) comes looking for missing author James Caan and meets the woman holding HIM prisoner -- homicidal psycho Kathy Bates. Yet again, the investigator "had no idea of the person HE is dealing with (from Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates through Misery's Annie Wilkes, through Fargo's Sheriff Roy Tillman, the psychos travel across time) and..Bates kills him(in a brief shotgun murder -- in the book, the cop was younger and the Bates character took a long time slowly killing THAT guy, using a shovel handle spear to his back and running over his head with a tractor. Middlebrow "Misery" director Rob Reiner wasn't going to film THAT..)

It was a satisfying feeling to feel movie thriller history repeating itself yet again as Danish Graves moved confidently and with no guile towards his own death. Its a movie trope that has worked over and over again. "The Arbogast character."

PS. In the recent movie "Killers of the Flower Moon," a private investigator is hired to get to the bottom of mysterious Native American deaths in Oklahoma. When he appeared, I murmured "Arbogast." And I was right again.

[–] swanstep (2619) 4 months ago

Fargo Season 5 is getting some good reviews. Interestingly, a new season of True Detective is out now too (Season 3?) w/ Jodie Foster. It's getting good/'a return to season 1 form'-type reviews too. So prestige TV is delivering people their thriller fixes right now.

It occurs to me that the Arbogast-type predicament where an investigator hits the jackpot for their investigation but doesn't grasp that they have until it's too late (or could be) must actually be pretty common. Zodiac (2007) has a great tense scene where Jake Gyllenhaal's Robert Greysmith character who suspects that the Zodiac may have drawn the posters for a particular rep. cinema and so left his handwriting there. Greysmith ends up in the creepy basement of the owner of the cinema while they look for old posters only to find out there that the owner drew all the posters. Nothing ends up happening and Greysmith sprints out of there. It can seem like a fanciful case but surely lots of investigations of crimes must have moments like this, where you think you're in a neutral, investigatory space and then you seem to learn something that if all your other background theories are correct makes your current environment very dangerous indeed. Of course your background theories are probably wrong but you'll still be pretty freaked out, be unable to take the risk that you're right and have to beat a fast retreat.

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

Fargo Season 5 is getting some good reviews.

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The cast is good, principally the "names" (Jon Hamm -- horrific villain; Jennifer Jason Leigh of The Hateful Eight, merciless business villain; and the sweet faced Juno Temple -- from the Godfather movie, The Offer, as the heroine -- plus other, diverse characters.) The references to the original 1996 movie Fargo are more rampant I think than in earlier seasons. Entire famous scenes, lines and moments are lifted, plus much of Carter Burwell's score (note for film history: one of Burwell's earliest scores was the weird and atonal score for Psycho III -- he abandoned that style for his more classical and orchestral Coen scores -- Miller's Crossing, Fargo and True Grit sound very much alike.

As this season heads for its climax, I've found some plot resolutions to be too pedestrian, not up to the movie's grace, but...I'm in to the end. I wanna see Jon Hamm die real bad. Whether JJL fails in HER evil schemes, less likely I suppose, though I bet she'll help take Hamm out.)

As I mention -- over at its BOARD, ha -- I've seen and liked all the disparate Fargo seasons(one different story and cast per season, a nice short 10 episode run) but for the life of me I can't remember the plots or climaxes of any of them. My Man Billy Bob Thornton was in Season One, quite good, won an Emmy or a Globe or something.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

a new season of True Detective is out now too (Season 3?) w/ Jodie Foster. It's getting good/'a return to season 1 form'-type reviews too. So prestige TV is delivering people their thriller fixes right now.

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Well, first of all all these "prestige thriller series" seem to make sure to hire charismatic actors with a history, and then have two or them or them anchor eash disparate season. True Detective Season One had Matthew MacConaghey(in the year he won an Oscar and became a star) paired with Woody Harrelson(who has done and gone become one of our great character stars -- ready to take over as Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones follow Hackman and Nicholson into retirement.) And hey, yep, my old-but-not dead taking notice of the fact that Harrelson got a very memorable sex scene with a very memorable nude actress in that one. When such scenes are GOOD, you remember them. Psycho connection Vince Vaughn anchored another season (with Collin Farrell, I think.)

Its funny how these various stars do certain things to BECOME stars. Jon Hamm really only needed Mad Men to launch -- he's not the movie star he could have been(yet?) but he is a prescence. Its funny about Vince Vaughn -- given his rapid creation of a snarky, sarcastic comedy big guy character, his Norman Bates looks more wrong with every passing year(its as if Hitchcock had cast Dean Martin at the time.) Jodie Foster has "the goods" -- two Oscars, Taxi Driver, Silence of the Lambs -- and has kept going for decades. Etc.

And in today's streaming world, once these actors MAKE their names -- they are never unemployed again. SOME movie, SOME series wants the names, NEEDS the names.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

I've been watching that Reacher series, which is evidently "Number One" in its Amazon streaming world -- and fairly predictable action stuff -- but, its like eating peanuts. Reacher IS a big guy, with a great storyline(no home, no car, no family, no woman, takes the bus around the country, grabs jobs where he can find them) and great evil bad guys to destroy. (And women for brief affairs, Bond style.) Tom Cruise as a short guy made Reacher work at the movies, but i've read a few Reacher books now and -- they've cast correctly -- giant-sized(Alan Ritchson.)

The head villain in this season of Reacher is yet another sort of name -- that guy who was the evil terminator in Terminator 2(way back in 1991) and the ill-fated gambling addict sporting goods store owner on the Sopranos. He looks a lot older now but...he's a name, too. Except I can't remember his name. I'll look it up and get back.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

It occurs to me that the Arbogast-type predicament where an investigator hits the jackpot for their investigation but doesn't grasp that they have until it's too late (or could be) must actually be pretty common.

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Yes, I realize I'm so personally programmed for "the Arbogast character" that I actually find it amusing -- in the company of people in my life over the years -- to say "Arbogast" when that character shows up.

One might say: "but isn't ANY murder victim in a thriller likely to be an Arbogast if they aren't a Marion Crane(killed as a woman, for her sexuality -- like the victims in Frenzy.) Well...yes and no. Psycho posits this irony -- the really smart guy who figures everything out and gets killed for it but WORSE -- is given some ironic chances to ESCAPE and doesnt' take them..because (Hitchcock's GREAT line in his trailer) "the victim had no idea of the kind of people he is dealing with."

Thus Arbogast calls in his vital information to Lila from the phone booth, and GOES BACK to the motel. And earlier, Arbogast introduces himself to Norman on the motel porch saying 'I almost drove right past." HAD he driven right past -- survival. (And Marion still disappeared.)

Marion herself is a bit of an Arbogast -- at least a victim of Hitchcockian irony -- in that only a wrong turn takes her to the Bates Motel and that once she learns she is a mere 15 miles away from Sam's place...she elects to stay the night. SHE could have escaped. No dice in Hitchcock's world.

I did some musing: plenty of Arbogasts have died in movies since the original in 1960..but in a world of 30s, 40s, and 50s mysteries and noir films, were there not more than a few Arbogasts BEFORE 1960? Probably, but none of them died in such a horrific, terrifying and downright creepy way -- drawing such screams.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

Wracking my brain, the closest I came to a "pre-1960 Arbogast" was Jerome Cowan as Miles Archer, the partner of Sam Spade(Humphrey Bogart) in The Big Sleep. As I recall, Archer is introduced in the first scene with Bogart and dies in the next scene, murdered by an unseen person (the cops said somethign about the killing that I always felt was queasy-making: "Shot...right through the pump" (the heart.) Ecch.

As I recall, the partner took the late night meeting over Bogart getting to do it, and got killed. Still...not quite Arbogast.

Speaking of Sam Spade, I'm reminded that pre-Arbogast, movies and TV were FILLED with private eyes who went into dangerous places(and "walked the mean streets") , got beat up, got shot up (but not mortally), ended up in hospital beds for a time -- but SURVIVED. And had the toughs to out fight or out shoot the bad guys -- I'm thinking Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe(Bogart, followed by about 10 other actors) .. Mike Hammer(REALLY brutal) and the very popular Peter Gunn, played by Craig Stevens and on the air in 1960 when Psycho came out. I've watched Peter Gunn on Amazon, and a lot of it is filmed on the same Universal backlot city street that serves as Fairvale in Psycho. Arbogast was sort of an "anti-Peter Gunn," not nearly as tall,thin and handsome as Peter Gunn, but suave ENOUGH(I bet Arbogast was a ladies man, the way Balsam played him.)

Might as well add Mike Connors as Mannix -- in color from the 60s/70s cusp. I've been watching a few of those on Amazon right now. Not very well written, but compelling and Mannix shares something with Peter Gunn -- both are Korean War vets, an interesting "in between" vet between WWII and Viet Nam. Both private eyes use their combat skills and martial arts to fight.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

Super-weird trivia about Mannix: when all the episodes appeared on Amazon, I went looking for the one from February 8, 1969 that Brad Pitt watches in his trailer in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In the scene Pitt watches, Mannix is commiserating with his African-American secretary, Peggy(see, diversity all the way back then) about her troubled romance with a musician.

So I looked up that episode "Peggy has a troubled romance with a musician" -- clicked on it and -- a different episode appeared(with stalwart TV guest star William Windom as the guest.) I guess Amazon had to remove the 'Brad Pitt Mannix episode" -- too many people order it up?

A later episode I sampled had a double dose of Hitchcock in it: Mannix's old flame Vera Miles(as ubiquitious a TV guest star as William Windom back then) comes to Mannix to help clear her new husband of murder (oh THAT old plot.) Miles sort of carried Lila Crane around with her all the time -- the voice, the manner, the less than glamourous feeling -- she was destined to be a working TV actress.

The second dose was discomfiting. At a certain point in the story, a villainous auto mechanic sabotages the brakes and accelerator on Mannix's rental car and he and ANOTHER female guest star(soon to be Mrs. C on Happy Days) take a wild car ride down a mountain road that is depressingly close to what Hitchcock did "for a movie" with Family Plot. I always felt that that Family Plot scene -- while better cut, built and acted than the usual TV scene -- WAS a TV scene. And this Mannix episode proved it.

Back on point: in a world of Spades, Marlowes, Hammers, Gunns and Mannixes -- private eyes who survived, Arbogast leads a separate crew of unlucky private eyes and cops (the cop in Eastwood's Play Misty for Me is very close, and Gary Busey is great in The Firm) that have been interesting to watch over the years.

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

I'll also say this: the slasher victims in movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween lack the verbal skills, wit, intelligence and "doom" of Arbogast -- they just sort of get picked off at random, while doing random things(like having sex.)

Far better for a murder victim to bring some smarts to the table, and the plot some irony(if ONLY Arbogast didn't go back) to the story.

Not to mention Hitchocck's truly great line -- not in a movie , in a TRAILER --"The victim had no idea of the kind of people they were confronting."

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

Zodiac (2007) has a great tense scene where Jake Gyllenhaal's Robert Greysmith character who suspects that the Zodiac may have drawn the posters for a particular rep. cinema and so left his handwriting there. Greysmith ends up in the creepy basement of the owner of the cinema while they look for old posters only to find out there that the owner drew all the posters. Nothing ends up happening and Greysmith sprints out of there.

--

That's a great scene, and has some of the Arbogast/Psycho elements - principally that our investigator(a total amateur -- a newspaper CARTOONIST, not a reporter) has made the mistake of going there all alone and the fact that the person being interviewed is a rather wimpy looking non-threatening man. But once they are down in that basement and Fincher bears down hard on the creepy suspense -- a great scene.

And yet, I think, a frustrating one. My love/hate relationship with Zodiac is that it resolutely refuses to "pay off" at any point in the story, and so that particular scene comes off as a "false come on " -- a suspense scene that does NOT pay off(As Arbogast's murder surely did.) Also, I think we figure that Gyellenhall is our lead, and not really in danger -- though certainly a movie could have been made where he WAS killed(ala leads in Psycho and LA Confidential.)

There's another super-tense scene in the movie where a young female driver encounters (likely?) the Zodiac on an empty highway at night. He flags her down, volunteers to fix her tire, she allows it, she drives off -- the tire collapses -- he rigged it to do so. She volunteers to ride for help to a gas station with him and then reveals she has an infant with her. The infant evidently defuses his killer instincts, and he dumps woman and child alive on the road.

Great scene, super-suspenseful and yet -- no real payoff. The cops don't pay all THAT much attention to this incident(which evidently happened in real life, which made it hard to dramatize as more than it was.)

CONT

[–] roger1 (2351) 4 months ago

It can seem like a fanciful case but surely lots of investigations of crimes must have moments like this, where you think you're in a neutral, investigatory space and then you seem to learn something that if all your other background theories are correct makes your current environment very dangerous indeed.

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That's the Arbogast version.

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Of course your background theories are probably wrong but you'll still be pretty freaked out, be unable to take the risk that you're right and have to beat a fast retreat.

--

That's the Zodiac "basement of the movie poster guy" scene.

Of course, a difference with Arbogast is that(again) "he has no idea of the kind of people he is dealing with." I never thought he went up those stairs totally "off guard," but he probably figured: "I can handle that sick old woman, I can handle that spindly young man." And he is also wondering if it is Marion he is going to meet up there.

If a detective DOES know he's entering a dangerous place in a movie, he's on guard and maybe he survives.

Variations on a theme...