This is the axis around which turns the folly of man.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Oliver Reed
Oliver Reed
was manlier than you
(and that goes double for you women)
was manlier than you
(and that goes double for you women)
Ollie as Oliver!'s Bill Sikes. What a scamp!
Oliver Reed was one of the last great real men of cinema and the stuff of folk legend. He was basically the origin of all post-Wild West era tough-guy clechés. Oliver Reed was the gnarliest honest-to-god-bad-ass ever to portray a fictitious bad-ass on screen. Just look at this guy... he looks the way Mr.Hyde should've looked. He looks like a guy that'll sick the hounds on you. Plus he's got all kinds of street cred from beating up hundreds of strangers in bar fights around the globe. He had knife scars on his face from fights HE WON! He's been stabbed, sucker-punched and clubbed and yet, he always managed to clean the floor with the sorry scoundrel that met his prehistoric gaze. He drank prodigious amounts of booze. Swore. Spat. Did one handed push-ups on the bar. And singularly composed the epicenter of a small wandering tornado that obliterated douchbags.
A rare non-menacing pose.
He was an ironic combination of tough guy and refinement An irony that he embraced with such zeal, that in all of his most infamous televised appearances, you can clearly see how proud he is of himself as he confounds his interviewers with the most deadpannedly delivered absurdities ever aired. He dressed himself impeccably and affected the sophisticated tones of aristocracy. His example is one of such singularity that he could never be imitated.
"I have two ambitions in life: one is to drink every pub dry, the other is to sleep with every woman on earth."
(Oliver Reed, paraphrased)
Ollie fondly reminiscing of the time he drank a case of beer, a magnum of wine, a gallon of scotch, beat 25 men at arm wrestling, squeezed 42 pairs of tits, ate an entire side of beef, smoked a box of Cuban cigars, and had sex with everybody.... No wait...he's unconscious in this one... (SORRY!)
Check that righteous 'stache... perfect use for all that surplus upper lip area of his.
He had a great sense of humor and never took himself too seriously. His fingers were like suspension bridge cables. He proudly grew and displayed nearly every possible facial hair combination. It just goes on and on. I can think of no more worthy a toast, that would satisfy the dark forces of the universe that so commonly prey on hapless drunks, than: (raise your glass high) "To Oliver Reed"
This is about as tough as any man could ever look whilst sitting in a restaurant booth.
John Wayne
John Wayne
And here is the big dog. A real American hero. Marion Robert Morrison. John Wayne. Probably the most iconic American actor of all time. Hell, he represented the ol' red white and blue so well, that no good commie sonofabitch Joseph Stalin ordered his assassination. Luckily for the hundreds of assassins that were basically ordered to embark on their would be sent to certain doom, the order was rescinded by Nikita Khrushchev.
When he was born, astrologists and scientists studied him and determined that he would eventually grow to become the manliest man on earth, but the forces exerted by his pure masculinity could result in women being impregnated only by meeting his gaze. This would have had catastrophic consequences. So they had no choice but to limit him from ever reaching his full potential by giving him a girl's name, "Marion" And this is why John Wayne had the same given name as my grandmother.
He often appeared on screen with Ward Bond, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Lee Marvin, Ed Asner & Kirk Douglas. And he was such an undeniable bad ass that they had to play the pussies!
John Wayne stood anywhere between 6'4" and 9' tall, depending if he was slouching or if he'd accidentally doubled up his shoe lifts.
His fishing boat was a retired mine sweeper.
He fell out of favor during the hippie-dippy late 60's but didn't give a damn. He understood why people were pissed off, he just couldn't figure out why they had to be so damn annoying about it.
One time John Wayne was staying in a hotel room in Las Vegas directly below a room where Frank Sinatra was staying. Well Frankie was partying down pretty hard and John normally wouldn't have minded but he had just gone about two weeks on a drinking spree and was really tired. So he walked over to the room and kindly asked Frankie if he'd like to be dangled out the window Sug' Knight style. Then he punched out one of Sinatra's bodyguards and laid him out cold, because old boy was giving him some kind of "You can't talk like that to Mr. Sinatra" shit, and the Duke here was all like "WHAT-EV-ER! I'm gonna talk him how-ever I want! And your music is too loud in here too! So here's some sweet chin music!" and WAM! Right in the kisser! And Frankie was all like "I'm so sorry our loud partyin' has been disturbing your rest, Mr. Wayne. Please forgive me, I don't want to dance your insane tango of death tonight." And the Duke was appeased and went back to his room. True story more or less.
Death
He could only be killed by an Atom Bomb. Oh yeah, it's true. You know that the Duke was going through a whole carton of smokes a day when he filmed The Alamo. Huge flop. But the real killer was when he filmed his other great cinematic disaster, The Conqueror (1956).
The Conqueror was a poorly conceived (or was it contrived?) epic film produced by none other than Howard Hughes, that cast Wayne (a 6'4" white man) as Ghengis Khan (a possible dwarf of Asian decent). Exterior scenes were shot near St. George, Utah, 137 miles downwind of the United States government's Nevada Test Site, Operation Upshot-Knothole, where extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing occurred during the 1950s. After spending weeks on site, Hughes (famous for his keen rationality) later shipped 60 tons of dirt from the area back to Hollywood to finish the film on a sound stage. The film-makers knew about the nuclear tests—apparently there are pictures of Wayne holding a Geiger counter during production—but hey, this was the 50s and 7 out of 10 doctors recommended Lucky Strike cigarettes. Hell, Wayne was probably smoking in those goddamn pictures.
Director Dick Powell died of cancer in January 1963, only a few years after the picture's completion. Hayward, Wayne, and Moorehead all died of cancer in the mid to late 1970s. Cast member actor John Hoyt died of lung cancer in 1991. Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960 and committed suicide after he learned it was terminal. Skeptics point to other factors such as the wide use of tobacco—Wayne and Moorehead in particular were heavy smokers—and the notion that cancer resulting from radiation exposure does not have such a long incubation period. The cast and crew totaled 220 people. By 1981, 91 of them had developed some form of cancer and 46 had died of the disease. Figures did not include several hundred local American Indians who served as extras on the set. Nor did it include relatives who had visited cast and crew members on the set, such as the Duke's son Michael Wayne. A People magazine article quoted the reaction of a scientist from the Pentagon's Defense Nuclear Agency to the news: "Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne".
So there you have it. The Duke was killed by nuclear weapons.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
