By now, Kenny Rogers has become such an icon that it's easy to forget how he got there. The songs on 42 Ultimate Hits, bringing together the top songs of his career from the late 60s First Edition years up to his current return to the charts, offers a crash-course reminder that Rogers is a star because he excels at his craft. Just look at the titles: "Lady," "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town," "The Gambler," "She Believes in Me," "Islands in the Stream," "We've Got Tonight," "Buy Me A Rose." Not a ditty among them. Then listen. The sweetly raspy vocals are instantly identifiable as Kenny Rogers - he sounds like nobody else. More importantly, he inhabits each song, making it vivid and tangible. For more than five decades, Rogers has delivered memorable songs, drawing fans among rock, pop, soul and country audiences. When one singer makes such an indelible mark, that's not mere luck or even simple talent. "I really, really love what I'm doing," Rogers says. "People survive longer if they love what they're doing. Because you just don't quit." Houston-born Rogers formed his first band while in high school in 1956 and never quit making music from that point on. The rockabilly group, called The Scholars, got a record deal and released two singles that had local success, and led to a performance spot on American Bandstand. Soon afterward, Rogers joined the Bobby Doyle Trio, playing stand-up bass in the jazz band, and appearing on their album. In 1966 he became a member of the New Christy Minstrels, the popular folk group, leaving a year later to form The First Edition with other members of the troupe. REFERENCE: http://kennyrogers.musiccitynetworks.com/index.htm
The Night Goes On by Kenny Rogers - Album: What About Me? - Year: 1984
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7BPvEi3SmY
Dream Dancing by Kenny Rogers - Album: What About Me? - Year: 1984
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrHb_R6qZA
What About Me by Kenny Rogers With Kim Carnes and James Ingram - Album: What About Me? - Year: 1984
The Stranger by Kenny Rogers - Album: What About Me? - Year: 1984
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x__wqmutTqY
Kenny Rogers Interview with Jimmy Carter
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJfNJ8T2ECw
Bearded, amiable American singer/actor Kenny Rogers launched his professional career as a member of the New Christy Minstrels, then first rose to fame as a member of the country-pop group the First Edition. After several years of hits like "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town" (as well as popular syndicated TV series Rollin' on the River), the First Edition broke up in 1974. Rogers had some lean years immediately after the split, at one point making ends meet by promoting a correspondence school guitar course. The outlook became brighter in 1976 when Rogers recorded his first solo hit, "Love Lifted Me," which he followed up with the even more popular ballad "Lucille." He regained his following with a dozen TV specials and several duets with equally renowned female country artists. In 1980, Rogers made his TV-movie debut with The Gambler (1980), an agreeable Western based on one of his more successful songs ("You gotta know when to hold 'em/know when to fold 'em...etc."). The Gambler scored an immediate ratings coup, inspiring sequels over the next decade, the best of which was The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991), which had the added drawing card of guest appearances by several popular TV cowboy stars of days gone by. Rogers also pleased the crowd with the made-for-TV Coward of the County (1981), a dramatized elaboration of another of his top-selling songs. Less successful was Kenny Rogers' starring theatrical feature, Six Pack (1982), which proves that having six cute kids onscreen doesn't make you a Disney-quality hit. REFERENCE: Kenny Rogers Full Biography - ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi http://movies.nytimes.com/person/61111/Kenny-Rogers/biography
Kenny Rogers Interview with Charlie Rose 1/3
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IMGubAyvLc
Country music singer Kenny Rogers talking about his successful Roasters chicken franchise, his musical career, and his album 'Time Piece' with showmaster Charlie Rose. This interview was recorded on Wednesday, September 28, 1994.
Kenny Rogers Interview with Charlie Rose 2/3
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4VsJEHwMTE&feature=related Kenny Rogers Interview with Charlie Rose 3/3
SAN FRANCISCO — At the end he was huge, stranded, nearly alone, his life littered by the needs (or the appearance) of more and more children, and by what was reported as near penury. It sounds bad enough to deserve some relief: being Marlon Brando had stopped being fun some long time ago -- though everyone who ever knew him would tell you that fun, mischief, earthiness and raw spontaneity were his inspiration. Marlon Brando's Oscar "Refused" Oscar Award for his Performance in The God Father due to the Mistreatment of American Indians.
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXg0loAnF4Y
'THE GODFATHER' That Unfinished Oscar Speech By MARLON BRANDO March 30, 1973 http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/godfather-ar3.html
The obituaries make Colonel Kurtz in ''Apocalypse Now'' seem like a rehearsal for the final isolation of our greatest actor, and there were ways, I think, in which it was a contrived and even an engineered role. For there was a mixture of self-pity and self-destructiveness in Mr. Brando that could not endure the toxic diet of straight American success. His enormous appetites -- for food, for sex and for money -- were all pursued to prove how free he was, and yet how childish he could be. Emotionally, he reckoned himself always a misfit, and in real terms he was surely destined to be an outcast, a great hulk whose every sigh added to his own legend.
Performances date, of course, and film is a dire, cruel medium that lets us laugh at things that once moved people to the depth of their being. The Brando who became a model for the Actors Studio style, the Stanislavski Method or Elia Kazan's intensity (however you want to call it) already looks like a figure from history. Even Terry Malloy, in ''On The Waterfront'' (for which he won his first Oscar, in 1954) now seems a very beautiful, poetical ex-boxer. But Mr. Brando was always as much a romantic as he was a brute: there was no kind of moment in which he was more magical than when a plain man was suddenly pierced by a fine thought.
On the other hand, his Vito Corleone, for which he won his second Oscar, in 1972, strikes us still as decent and rather humble. Vito is a family man and a businessman, blessed to be in America, but led astray and terribly pained to think that his most beloved son, Michael, might have to follow his own dark steps. ''The Godfather'' is a complex parable -- richer and more lasting than ''On the Waterfront'' in part because Vito is so ordinary and natural a man. The film has also endured because it knows the ease with which American idealism can become dreadfully compromised.
Larry King Live Marlon Brando interview (part 1 of 6)
Mr. Brando's Colonel Kurtz went ''up the river'' in Vietnam for similar reasons -- the best soldier of his time had seen how depraved the American armed forces had become. That Kurtz had seen Abu Ghraib. Look today at the 25-year-old ''Apocalypse Now,'' and you cannot miss its dismay at where America was headed.
And that is a vital part of Marlon Brando's importance. He made many very bad films, too many; he often seemed to lose interest in a film before it was finished. Yet even when the movie itself was dreadful, his performance could be exquisite. And four or five times in his life, he found himself cast in roles that were emblematic of the inner confusions of his nation.
Mutiny on the Bounty
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEmZ_A0UTrA
ONE EYED JACKS - Brando's Masterpiece - Theatrical Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5zLqS9Abo0
The first such role, of course, was Stanley Kowalski in ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' Read that play on the page and it is unmistakably a play about Blanche DuBois. Stanley is away a lot of the time. But in our culture now it is a play about the two of them, in large part because the director, Elia Kazan, had to have a male figure with whom he could identify. And so a weird chemistry took effect: Kazan's heterosexual thrust animated the gay metaphor in Tennessee Williams's play.
Julius Caesar (1953)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUMvBL3gnY
Bedtime Story (Marlon Brando & David Niven)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kYRKT5SvB0
The sensation of ''Streetcar'' -- the 30-minute ovations it received on Broadway in 1947 -- was never just for Blanche. (Who played Blanche in that first production? It was Jessica Tandy.) It was for this new male figure on stage, so close you could smell the sweat, a brute and a beauty at the same time -- and Brando the kid was so beautiful the applause may have nearly overwhelmed the actor sometimes.
Reflections in a Golden Eye
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCNHtiZu2TU
Last Tango In Paris Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x4UOsLC0OE
But the notion that turbulence and incoherence had within them poetry and passion was not merely the engine to the Method -- and all the naturalistic acting that came from it -- it was the script that James Dean, Elvis Presley and just about every teenage icon ever since would act out. It is also a horribly American type: so strong, so anxious to be thought powerful, yet so desperate for tenderness.
The Godfather: Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf16Vc3iZjE
Apocalypse Now Original Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt0xxAMTp8M
The other great role that those words could describe is Mr. Brando's American in Bernardo Bertolucci's ''Last Tango in Paris,'' made at a moment when the movies were so intoxicated by their own advances in the portrayal of sexual behavior that they needed a big star to really, truly ''do it'' on screen. Only an outsider would have taken that part. Only our generosity lets us overlook the fact that Mr. Brando was never as naked or vulnerable in the film as the woman, Maria Schneider.
But then you have to consider the quality of personal pain that Mr. Brando brought to the role. Mr. Bertolucci encouraged Mr. Brando to draw from his own experience for his character, and Mr. Brando's monologues, most of them improvised, are painfully raw. The film is astonishing for the way in which it established sexuality as the template of existence.
That zest has slipped a bit in our movies of late -- to the movies' loss -- but there is evidence of the mood and the need returning. If so, then the terrible conflict of sexual yearning and familial duties that is at the heart of ''Last Tango'' (and which may have helped make it such a wrenching experience for Mr. Brando, who wrote afterward that it had destroyed him emotionally) will be current again.
Island of Dr Moreau
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CPyGi7WbOw
The Freshman
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6yCXASfcQk
Of course, we wanted so much more from Marlon Brando -- his Lear, his Hamlet, his Uncle Vanya, his Willy Loman. We wanted the plays that might have been inspired by him if he had stayed loyal to the theater. But he went west to a city he never liked and a business that he despised, driven in part by the money he could make. In truth, he handled the money like a kid in a candy store, but then he would rebuke Hollywood for its crassness and its greed. He wanted everything, and he wanted to be the hero. Though he grew vast and decrepit, he may never have grown up.
The Score (2001)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DE0aQnYDH8
It is striking -- and not entirely beyond the bounds of great dramatic timing -- that his death comes at a moment when America's maturity is tragically necessary yet tormentingly distant. If only, we feel, now that he is gone, if only he could have tried again. REFERENCE: The Madness in His Method By David Thomson Published: July 03, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/opinion/03THOM.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/opinion/03THOM.html?pagewanted=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/opinion/03THOM.html?pagewanted=3
So the great director's films are about violence? Not really. Are they about honour? Hardly. In fact, says Rick Moody, Sam Peckinpah offered us realism - albeit of a very particular kind - "Now, most funeral orations, Lord, lie about a man," - so says David Warner, in his memorable turn as Joshua, the fraudulent preacher in Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue, from 1970. The same can be said of most film criticism - that it dissimulates or exaggerates about the film, about the director, about the movement, about the art. So let's aspire in this revisionist essay on Peckinpah to tell the truth. Although it's worth noting that when you believe what characters say in a Peckinpah film, you play right into the director's malevolent hands.
Passion & Poetry - Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1/4)
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sVmzAmNBhw
Passion & Poetry - Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (2/4)
Nevertheless, the first point that must be made, here in the 21st century, is that Peckinpah's films are not terribly violent. That's how he made his reputation: as "Bloody Sam", the man who never met a bucket of theatrical blood he wasn't willing to splash around, and who always made certain you knew when the blood was about to flow, by means of slow motion. Still, by today's standards, the better part of the Peckinpah canon is not terribly violent - not when judged against today's rivers of gore. There are, in Peckinpah, no fountaining bodies, no bits of brain tissue splattered about. Anything released in the last 20 years is quite a bit more repellent. Seen any of those Saw movies?
Passion & Poetry - Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (3/4)
Ride the High Country is a good place to start for the uninitiated. Released in 1962, it scarcely departs from the western as we understand it. There's the good guy, Steve Judd, and the bad guy, Gil Westrum, and they behave according to type for the first reel, at least until they get into the business of saving a young, impetuous romantic (the very first film role of Mariette Hartley) from her up-country fiance. Then the good guys and bad guys get curiously admixed, till it is hard to tell which is which. Indeed, Hartley's impetuous tomboy and Randolph Scott's old cowpoke have, toward the end, an exchange on the ubiquity of gray areas between right and wrong.
THE WILD BUNCH - Trailer - HQ
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwE3TfJUB48
This exchange could serve as a template for the morality of the entire Peckinpah oeuvre. Still, the threatened gang rape in High Country happens mainly by implication, and there is little here of Peckinpah, master of the high-noon showdown. Even in the midst of the climactic shootout, the camaraderie between the "bad" Westrum and the "good" Scott, as they pick off a posse of far worse mountain men, is anything but removed from the western genre. The shootout involves a lot of grimacing, and there is ample time, despite perforations, for Scott's last pronouncements. After which the orchestra swells!
Pat Garret & Billy the Kid Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CcadC-S8-E
In The Ballad of Cable Hogue, the Jason Robards vehicle that Peckinpah made in 1970, just after The Wild Bunch, the comic and light-hearted moments that also marked the first reel of Ride the High Country are back, even expanded. Though the filming apparently suffered many problems, not least of which was the director's frequent intoxication, the results are good-natured, even heartwarming. Robards's performance, in which he often appears alone, inveighing against God, or fate, or luck, is marked by an almost Beckettian slapstick existentialism. His scenes with David Warner, too, are funny, sly, and immediately accessible to cinemagoers who also admire Ionesco or Pirandello. While I am sure Peckinpah believed he was remaking the western along more realistic lines - John Wayne and John Ford needed to be dispatched, after all - this is not the film that achieves that end. The western, in Cable Hogue, is comic, is populated by stock outlaws and tipplers. Its only generic innovation is its nihilism about the possibility of good. The preacher is a liar and pervert, the bank owner delights in the collapse of the revivalist's tent, the whore is the only girl in town, who does, of course, despite her short temper, have the heart of gold. Where's the realism in this?
Straw Dogs (1971) - Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQjQIXzFCRA
The big revenge sequence in Cable Hogue, wherein Robards repays the two drifters who left him in the desert to rot, is modest, and, as befitting the gentler, wiser Peckinpah, one of the thieves is saved. Even the "bad guy" who gets sacrificed goes down not in a hail of bullets, but in a modest single shot. In fact, the most violent sequence in Cable Hogue is the very first, in which Robards, while attempting to make lunch out of a gila monster, has it shot out of his hands. Presumably humane treatment of desert animals had not yet swept the film industry. And what of the later films? Not so violent either. Junior Bonner, The Killer Elite, Convoy (among the most inexplicable moves in a career filled with odd moments), The Osterman Weekend. Pretty tame!
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - 1974 Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPaUPU9xdgM
The unvarnished truth is that the Peckinpah reputation for excessive violence, a violence which no longer looks terribly violent, rests on a very few films: on The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Of these, Pat Garrett is not terribly successful - we can probably discount its meanderings, despite the strange Bob Dylan cameo, and the beautiful soundtrack that accompanies him. Its longueurs are not made tolerable by the genuine magnetism of antagonists James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson, the latter of whom, prior to the grizzled outlaw role into which he later settled for good, appears here as an amiable and stunningly handsome Billy the Kid. The camera just loves the guy.
The Getaway - Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FhkOy1inT8
The Wild Bunch, however - a true masterpiece - presents a whole raft of problems. Auteur-criticism types will tell you that the story is about honour, as in this memorable exchange between the two principal desperadoes, played by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, here disputing over the vigilante who has followed them into Mexico:
Holden: "What would you do in his place? He gave his word."
Borgnine: "To a railroad!"
Holden: "It's his word."
Borgnine: "That ain't what counts! It's who you give it to!"
Peckinpah seems to imagine that honour is at the story's core; that despite the whoring, drunkenness, money-lust, and savagery that propels the tale, the principals do get around to defending their Mexican friend Angel from the brutal Mapache - though a little too late, as it turns out. And yet the film itself, with a body count in the hundreds, and its prolonged shoot-outs (sequences that have surely influenced all the action film excesses that followed: the Schwarzenegger films, the Seagal films, the Van Damme films), its absolutely demeaning treatment of women, is not exactly what one would consider honourable at all.
The Osterman Weekend - Trailer
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpO3MBfoMVE
The opening title sequence, in which the outlaw posse controlled by Holden's character Pike Bishop enters town and attempts to rob a railroad, is noteworthy for the way it juxtaposes its theme music and its incipient outlaw bloodlust with a scene of local children pitting two scorpions against an army of fire ants. In this way is innocence ruined, the title sequence seems to say, after which it reenacts this Nietzschean material, in the course of the film, again and again. Children, for example, ride the body of the martyred Angel, token Mexican member of the posse, as he is being dragged behind horses of the evil general; and, later, it's a child, serving as a sniper, who administers the coup de grace to Pike Bishop, when he is busy trying to clean out the general's entire army with a machine gun.
The west was like this, Peckinpah says, whether wittingly or unwittingly. It was not so much a place of honour as it was a place where life was cheap, where no one gave a second thought to the man standing next to him, and a buck, a bottle of scotch, and a syphilitic prostitute were enough to get a man through. Perhaps it is more honest to say that during the Vietnam years (the years in which Peckinpah operated at the peak of his abilities), the squeaky-clean western, the John Ford western, needed to give way to something far more jaundiced; a western that was more about survival of the fittest, and the will to power, and the corruption of the rugged individualist.
For similarly hard-hearted truths were available for consumption in some of the other classics of the Vietnam period, in, for example, Bonnie and Clyde, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Still, by the time we get to what is arguably the last watchable Peckinpah film, the incredibly strange Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), it is hard to believe that what is being dramatised amounts to any kind of world view at all. This later Peckinpah, using his reliable journeyman Warren Oates as vessel for autobiography, has by now slipped into some fugue state marked only by bizarre tragicomedy and fabulism. In fact, this revisionist western is so revisionist that it has jets, convertibles, accountants, and modern Mexico City in it. The revenger's narrative, however, is unchanged, almost entirely intact from The Ballad of Cable Hogue: a Mexican patriarch's underage daughter is impregnated by the aforementioned Alfredo Garcia, who was "like a son" to this crime boss. A million dollars to whomever will bring him the head! Somehow Oates, a luckless piano player in a dead-end Mexico City bar, becomes the bounty hunter who can deliver the goods, but not without giving up everything that's dear to him.
Alfredo Garcia is more like a B-film than the relatively high-minded fare of which one imagined Peckinpah capable after The Wild Bunch, or Straw Dogs, and The Getaway. And more like the B-films of Roger Corman than John Ford's. In a way, here at the end of his major output, the garishness, the half-heartedness of the production values, the fuzzy story and fuzzier characters remind us that at the end of his career, Peckinpah is among the undisputed poets of alcoholic cinema. Peckinpah in Alfredo Garcia never misses a chance to treat a woman badly, to make sure she shows the camera her breasts, and his joyless men seem to lust after nothing but money and rotgut drunk straight from the bottle. They have come to the end of their luck. As had the director himself. There's a desperation to Alfredo Garcia, therefore, and yet, for all that, it is hard turn away from it. Train wrecks, after all, offer a visceral satisfaction, if only for their scale.
And the very last thing Peckinpah shot? Right before his death? Julian Lennon's music videos for Vallotte and Too Late for Goodbyes. Did he need the money? Did he like playing the underdog? Was there something moving about musical advertisements for the son of a famous victim of violence? However you answer these questions, there's something starkly beautiful about Valotte. Julian Lennon, his features and his voice so unsettlingly reminiscent of his late father's, sits alone at the piano in a recording studio, as the camera seems to hover, as if from hereafter itself, at the uppermost corner of the ceiling above the performance.
There's nothing flashy or cheap about the video (in an era when cheap was the order of the day), and everything about it feels understated, even graceful. But whose heavenly ken is depicted therein? From the top of that ghostly staircase? John Lennon's point of view, lamenting a son he insufficiently came to know? Peckinpah's, who knew his time was short and that his vision, as realised, was incomplete? Maybe Valotte was a sort of funeral oratory, too - one, as in David Warner's speech from Cable Hogue, in which the orator was unable to lie. REFERENCE: Inside the head of Sam Peckinpah Rick Moody The Guardian, Friday 9 January 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/09/sam-peckinpah-retrospective
