THE LAST DRAGONPlot In A Nutshell
Director Michael Schultz’s 1985 martial-arts action comedy about an unworldly young kung fu expert (Taimak) who must protect the hostess (Vanity) of a TV dance party/music video program from the megalomaniac video arcade king who is trying to strongarm her into putting a video by his bimbo girlfriend on the air.
Thoughts
There are probably better, more important, more intellectually edifying movies out there that I could be watching as I improve my cinematic education, but I doubt there are many more giddily enjoyable than this one, one of only four theatrical features that Motown founder Berry Gordy personally produced, and the only one to have his name in the title. (The film is technically called Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon.) It’s not even a musical, although the story does stop cold at one point so that we can watch the video for Debarge’s hit “Rhythm of the Night.” It’s a campy throwaway of a film, but I like to think Gordy was charmed by it anyway — by its unnecessarily large cast of outsize characters and its eagerness to keep the audience entertained.
This is a movie with not just one but two crazed, sputtering villains, both of them separately pursuing the same obsessive goal of destroying pure-hearted, pacifist Leroy Green. The more dangerous of the two appears to be Sho Nuff, the self-proclaimed “shogun of Harlem” (Julius J. Carry III), who walks through the film in a perpetual state of fury — and who is driven to new heights of rage by Leroy’s refusal to rise to his bait and fight him. (Carry’s performance is equal parts Toshiro Mifune and Gene Simmons.)
But the real threat to Leroy is posed by the brilliantly named Eddie Arkadian, who Christopher Murney plays as sort of a comic spin on James Cagney’s Martin Snyder from Love Me or Leave Me — he’s a little thug who’s willing to do anything, up to and including cold-blooded murder, to make his girlfriend a star. If there were any justice in the world, this role would have made Murney a star as well, or at least a busy character actor, but the only notable role he seems to have landed since The Last Dragon was as the cop who John Goodman shoots in the head at the climax of Barton Fink. Eddie Arkadian is a wonderful pipsqueak villain — he even keeps a tank of piranhas in his office. I suspect he got the idea from a movie — he actually seems a little bit terrified of them.
Eddie’s girlfriend is played by Faith Prince, who would go on to play the similarly hapless, squeaky voiced showgirl Adelaide in the Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls. Here, she gets to sing a couple of funny bubblegum New Wave songs — including one called “Test Drive” that requires her to wear a license plate on her butt and a bra made of headlights — and while she doesn’t quite look the part of a music-video bimbo, her kiss-off scene with Eddie is worthy of Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. (She has a great exit line: as she marches out of the room, Eddie demands to know where she’s going. “Elocution lessons!” she says, tears streaming from her eyes.)
Ironically, the film’s only weak spot is the main character, who I wish hadn’t been conceived as such a virginal, goody-goody naif. (This kid is so uptight, he doesn’t even use contractions.) Buster Keaton was a genius at playing this kind of role — the innocent who turns out to have unexpected reserves of courage and physical grace. Obviously, it’s unfair to compare a first-time actor like Taimak to a genius like Buster Keaton, but something’s gone wrong when all the qualities that are supposed to make your main character seem heroic actually come off as annoyances.
Luckily, the film has such a large cast that Taimak’s deficiencies don’t seem too serious. Director Michael Schultz also made the wonderful comedy Car Wash, and like that film, The Last Dragon has the feel of a movie that tried give good parts to as many actors as possible, even if they only pop in for a single scene. William H. Macy (billed as W.H. Macy) gets one of his earliest screen roles as a flunky on Vanity’s TV show, and Chazz Palminteri shows up for a few seconds as one of Eddie Arkadian’s flunkies — he’s recognizable even wearing a thick black mustache that makes him look like Dennis Hopper in his “well-dressed man” disguise from Blue Velvet.
It turns out that practically the entire movie has been uploaded to YouTube; here’s Sho Nuff’s entrance scene, which gives you an idea of the film’s... er... heightened sense of reality:
RATING: 4/5
* * * * *
MR. ARKADINPlot In A Nutshell
Orson Welles’ 1955 lark, in which he plays a mysterious, sinister billionaire who hires a two-bit shakedown artist (Robert Arden) to investigate his past and the origins of his vast wealth, which he claims to be unable to remember.
Thoughts
Mr. Arkadin is often referred to as the film that Citizen Kane might have become without Herman J. Mankiewicz’s help on the script. But it struck me more as the film Citizen Kane might have become without RKO. Shot piecemeal on unpredictable locations with too little money, Arkadin lacks the polish that Welles was able to achieve with unlimited access to studio resources on Kane — many of the scenes feel like inspired solutions to technical shortcomings, the work of a director doing the best with what he had, a spell cast by a diminished wizard.
Still, there are wonders here amidst the confusing story — I particularly liked a scene where Welles menaces Patricia Medina in a cabin on a boat, with the camera and Medina rocking back and forth in the waves and only Welles able to stand still. The party scenes are also terrific, especially the masquerade ball that the uncouth Robert Arden attends at Arkadin’s castle in Spain, hoping to worm his way into Arkadin’s inner circle, obviously not fitting in even while wearing a mask. (There’s a good joke when someone tries to explain the symbolism of the masks to him: “You know Goya,” he says, whereupon Arden shakes the hand of a passing reveler and says, “No — good to meet ya!”) Arden’s Guy Stratten is a little like Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly: a brash, uncultured American thoughtlessly punching his way to the heart of a secret he’s unequipped to comprehend.
“A shallow masterpiece”: that’s what Pauline Kael called Citizen Kane, with its final revelation about Rosebud that even Welles, a little defensively, dismissed as “dollar-book Freud.” I can see where she’s coming from, especially watching a film like Mr. Arkadin, which seems to rely so much on directorial capework to get over with audiences — masks, beards, disguises, false names, shaggy-dog stories. Welles fills the script with those wry little parables he loved so much — the tale of the frog and the scorpion, the tale of the old man in the graveyard, the parable about the king and the poet that provides the film with its opening aphorism — and which, to him, explained all of human nature. Paradoxes, magic tricks, “now you see me, now you don’t”: Welles lets you think he’s let you in on a great secret, but with one twirl of his handkerchief, he vanishes it away.
As Gregory Arkadin, Welles wears a beautiful beard that, as one character remarks, makes him look like Neptune. It’s a fitting description: Welles, Arkadin, and Arkadin are all as difficult to grasp as water.
RATING: 3/5
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