A critic writing about sleaze in movies obviously needs a Theory About Sleaze In Movies. All I have are vague feelings. I think it’s gone. I want it back. I don’t think banishing nasty thrills from popular cinema has made our world a better place.
Merriam-Webster defines “sleazy” as “marked by low character or quality.” Today, in film conversation, I sense a constant rush for the high ground. I’m right, I’m better, I’m a good person. If you put something offensive in a movie, even to condemn it, aren’t you secretly embracing it, encouraging your audience to commit these stylish sins? Aren’t you, in fact, Bad? I don’t know. We all contain multitudes: sacred, profane, noble, depraved. Once upon a time, those different instincts could live in separate silos. Family-friendly cartoons on the living room TV, triple-x scuzz in the dirty grindhouse downtown, professional attire at the office, an orgy by the beach. Perhaps a healthy society needs churches and strip clubs. But who feels safe in a church anymore? The real horror with sleaze isn’t that it exists. It’s the fear that all these multitudes will collide together, private mistakes going public, nudes leaked, texts hacked, a moral authority’s immoral obscenity revealed. How far would you go to keep your worst self hidden? And how many people will suffer for your transgression?
In 52 Pick-Up, one man’s sleaze threatens his wonderful clean life. Harry Mitchell’s construction firm employs eighty people or more. He holds a patent on metal fusion that earns six figures annually. His wife Barbara is a Los Angeles political heavy — and she’s Ann-Margret! Actor Roy Scheider is middle-aged, but his swoopy hair (a rug, I’d wager) tells you he can party. It’s 1986, eleven years after Jaws, yet Scheider seems much younger than any island sheriff dad, and weightless with irresponsibility. The Mitchells are DINKs, so they have it all plus free time.
Then Harry visits the WeHo apartment where he keeps his girlfriend stashed. He finds three masked men. They carry guns, and worse, a videotape. The recording shows Harry cavorting with his young blonde “model” in Palm Springs and some by-the-hour motel. They’ve filmed his house, his wife, his office. They set him up, in fact, putting hotness in his eyeline knowing he couldn’t resist. Director John Frankenheimer lets us watch Harry watch himself, filming the TV and the man’s reflection on the screen. One criminal (played by John Glover) narrates the tape, like This Is Your Sordid Life. The blackmailers want $105 thousand. The ultimate price tag will be much higher.
I watched 52 Pick-Up to prepare for the Elmore Leonard episode of Screen Drafts, which you must listen to now. You can find the film easy on free streamers — Tubi, Roku, Pluto — but there was a time when it was an outlier and a failure. It predates the Leonard renaissance of the ‘90s and Frankenheimer’s own Ronin comeback. I grew up with Scheider as a fatherly seafarer in Jaws and SeaQuest DSV, so there’s a vital shock watching him play Reaganite scum.
Harry is scum. He feels guilt, worrying the affair will torpedo his wife’s city council campaign. But when he refuses to make a deal, his stubbornness has fatal consequences. The three criminals run the underworld gamut. Leo (Robert Trebor) manages a peep show. Bobby (magnetic Clarence Williams III) is a stone killer. As the mastermind Alan, Glover embodies two distinct branches of ‘80s villainy: He’s a pornographer who went to business school.
52 Pick-Up feels most Elmore Leonard when these personalities start counterplotting and double-backstabbing each other. But this isn’t a pulp-comic caper like the holy Leonard trinity of Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight. Frankenheimer wants shock chic and adult thrills. The singer Vanity is on hand as a frequently-unclothed friend of the criminals. Harry’s mistress Cini is young Kelly Preston, who’s only asked to perform come-hither beauty and terror. Ann-Margret is very good, especially when the wife learns about the girlfriend. “Our marriage has lasted 23 years,” Barbara reminds Harry, “That’s longer than she’s been alive.” It’s a cold line in a cold movie, and 52 Pick-Up traps all the women in macho gamesmanship. Rich horndog on one side, poor slimeballs on the other, the females collateral damage at best.
This tale of bastards only turns more acidic. Just like in Ricochet, a prisoner gets heroin injected into their veins. Nobody in Ricochet, though, got strangled with a teddy bear. When real-life pornstars cameo in a party scene, you remember 52 Pick-Up takes place in the cocaine-and-bullets era of Boogie Nights. That masterwork is a helpful counter-example, entirely about sleaze in a way no one would call sleazy. Paul Thomas Anderson approached yesteryear scuzz with grand ambitions and humane intentions. 52 Pick-Up simply is that scuzz. Worth the price of a peep, even if you wouldn’t want it in your house. The ideal setting was a theater, a big dark room full of strangers and unknowable desires. We live in better, or worse, times. Tubi doesn’t even cost a nickel. But you can only get it at home.
Previous “If You Sleaze” entries: