Joe Santo Hits the Jackpot

This two month-ish movie quest began as I got inordinately excited about it while engaged in a typical stream of consciousness email to JAY!!. As will be revealed in some short order, we econverse pretty much on the daily. Hooray technology! The summer of action was spawned out of a number of factors:

• The Expendables is coming out, which is awesome. I don't know how the movie is going to be, but just that it's coming out, that's awesome right there.
• Since I moved 2000 miles from the Exquisite Brigitte and my fat and becoming-fat cats, I have a considerable amount of free time. During my nightly free time I watch a lot of movies. After six months of watching a lot of movies I was starting to get to a pretty weird place in my quqeueueeeueueue where I was watching a lot, I mean, A LOT of foreign movies. So I was open to suggestions, shall we say.
• I thought it would be fun to collectively produce some form of entertainment with my fellow contributors, as we are downright hilarious any time we're together. However, aside from Jay and Joe, none of us technically live in the same city. (Yes, Jay and Dream Joe, you win the proximity contest. The Viceroy and I are a mere 5.9 miles from each other, but in are governed by different local agencies.) So the web, and a loose theme, seem a good place to start a collaboration.
• I was really excited to watch a bunch of classics that I shamefully hadn't seen, to make fun of Sly's awful acting, Arnold's terrible accent, and the lame plots of Jason Statham movies, and I was excited to see a lot of people get kicked in the face and have stuff gloriously blown up.
• And as I built my SoA ququeueueuwueuuwwue, I was tickled every time I added an early-career movie by Sly or Arnold. I like quality films, but as evidenced by my crush on Best of the Best 2, I'm 100% game for camp as well.

I have no idea where the Viceroy gets this "Son of Hercules" business, as from my trusty interweb sources Arnold's first credited role is "Hercules in New York." I saw part of this movie in college. It included the line "Hey, stop that chariot!" being yelled in the middle of New York. It was spectacular. However, due to his thick accent, Arnold's voice was dubbed right out of the film. The first Arnold movie available on netflix was "Stay Hungry". So under the guise of my last bullet point, I was elated to add it to my queueeeueueueue, and aside from some mid-week work fatigue and the after effects of laboriously recapping "The Fist of the North Star", delighted to receive it and throw it in my video disc spinner.


What I knew going in was that the movie starred Arnold, Jeff Daniels, and Sally Field, and that Arnold, fittingly, played a bodybuilder at a gym which Daniels, despite or to spite some kind of business aspirations, became rather fond of. Perfect. The stage was set for a terrible, barely discernible meathead cameo by a guy who was a hot commodity because of his immense, rippling muscles.

Before the movie even started, however, I got an indication that camp was not going to be the order of the day. The DVD comes with a nice intro by Bob Rafelson, the co-writer and director for whom this was his first movie since leaving the production company that did major independent films such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Bob discusses the project briefly, including his relationship with co-writer Charles Gaines, who wrote the original novel, and his immersion into the body building 'scene' in the mid 70s ans he tried to figure out if he could make this a movie. He followed a number of pageants, or whatever more masculine word you give bodybuilding competitions, in particular falling in with Arnold. He discussed the movie with Arnold who promised Bob that if he made the movie he could screen as many actors as he wanted, but he'd eventually come back and ask Arnold to be the bodybuilding lead in the movie. Which he obviously did. History lesson: Bob reports that before they started filming (1975) Arnold claimed that he would one day be the governor of California.

The arc of the movie is thus: after his parents' death, Craig Blake (Bridges) is struggling with what to do next. He's not particularly keen on getting into the family steel business and is making overtures toward real estate with a bunch of his country club aristocrat buddies. Amongst the real estate conglomerate, each is to acquire one parcel on a city block in Birmingham, AL, which they will then raze to make way for a skyscraper. (Sidenote: how stupid is it that "raze" and "raise" are homonyms and antonyms? I shake my head in pity at English.) Well, Craig's target is a small gym where Joe Santo (Arnold) and his girlfriend Mary
Tate (Field) work and work out.

So Craig goes to check it out, gets into it, and before he can talk business with the owner, he's becoming besties with Joe, who even passes Mary Tate off to him so he can get freaky with one of Craig's fancypants ladyfriends. Craig's friend asks, "Isn't that pimping?" and I think it is, and it makes for a very weird but very 70s dynamic to the rest of the movie as she kind of flits between the two leads. In becoming better friends, Craig learns that Joe has previously excelled as a champion swimmer and curler (yes, with 42 pound stones on ice) and now wants to be the best bodybuilder (bizarre note: wikipedia claims that Arnold actually was competitively involved in both of these activities). Per the title, he keeps happy by "staying hungry" in life. Turns out he also plays a mean fiddle. This leads to a very fun back country scene with a bunch of hillbillies playing their instruments and Craig dancing around after drinking a bunch of moonshine and- CONTRAST OF SOCIETIES- major conflict when Joe plays his fiddle as a musical fill in for an aristocratic event.

Without going into too much detail, the climactic scene of the movie involves Craig getting pelted with weights for stopping the gym owner from raping Mary Tate and the all the bodybuilders who came to town for the Mr. Universe convention running around the city in their bikinis hitting poses, to the delight of the citizens of Birmingham. It's both ludicrous and spectacular. Ultimately Craig decides he's tired of being confined by living up to his name and living a restrictive, everyone's-watching-you country club lifestyle; he buys the gym with the intention of running it with Joe. He sells his mansion on "the mountain" to live with Mary Tate by his rules. And so our lesson/social commentary comes to an end: sometimes being rich and fancy ain't all its cracked up to be. Sometimes you just gotta live.

End of movie.

But not the end of the experience: I was so floored by the fact that Arnold was a character, rather than a caricature, in his first movie (he won a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut; if the technicalities are good enough for Oscar's stepbrother, they're good enough for me), so impressed by how cute Sally Field was, so entertained by Jeff Bridges being clean-shaven and athletic looking and not just The Dude or a country ripoff of The Dude, that I played it again with the commentary track. Now I didn't get anything groundbreaking out of the commentary, and I largely paid more attention to my online Risk games or the book I was reading than the movie the second time through, but the point is this: I did not hop up, tear the disc out of my DVD player, and stick it back in the netflix envelope to make way for the next ludicrous SoA movie. I enjoyed the movie. I thought it was well done. I thought it was sufficiently well done, entertaining, and interesting that I was interested in what stories Bob, Jeff, and Sally might have. If Arnold had had more roles like this one- brawn with a squeeze of brain- I wouldn't have been so flabbergasted by the insight that he'd been angling to be governor 35 years ago. And to be honest, his accent wasn't that bad.

So, just two days after my enthusiastic endorsement of Best of the Best 2, which I applauded for its blend of action, Vegas glamour, SoA staple actors, and muted camp, I hereby declare Stay Hungry the second Goobur Approved SoA Must-See (to be known as a GASM) thanks to its surprising quality and entertaining story.