As we meet tonight at the Wop,we bid a bittersweet adieu to actor,Leslie Nielsen,whose body of work contained many excellent genre roles in films like Forbidden Planet,Day of the Animals,Prom Night,and Creepshow,before achieving great popularity in light comedies and spoofs later in his career.It was a little distressing to see the number of people paying tribute to the late actor yesterday that totally neglected to notice what a great performer he was in dramatic roles.He was much more than a "funny guy",and let's hope history will remind folks of that.R.I.P. Leslie,you held your breath a long,long time.Onward...
Tonight's feature,a long time favourite of mine,got a lot of screenings at the legendarily decadent "working class holidays" at One Cherry back in the nineties.Through a fog bank of smoke of questionable origins,the parties cheered on the outrageous antics of underground artist R.Crumb's anthropomorphic cat,brought to life on the big screen by animation legend Ralph Bakshi and voiced by the insincere-sounding Skip Hinnant aka/Fargo North,the word decoder of '70's childrens' staple,The Electric Company.Jaded after toiling away on cartoons like Deputy Dawg and Heckle and Jeckle,Bakshi looked to animate a feature film that contrasted the bright and cheerful world of Walt Disney,and found it in an East Village bookstore in Crumb's satirical comics.The production was plagued with trouble from its problematic start,as the ever-squirrelly Crumb was reluctant to sign over the rights to his character,some animators walked off the job,refusing to draw the controversial sex and violence in the script,and distribution was stifled somewhat by the MPAA's X rating given to the feature and decadent material,but in the end,Fritz was a worldwide success,earning nearly two hundred million to date.
New York,from the fish-eyed viewpoint of hustlers and hippies.
After arriving too late to make any sort of impact on the burgeoning Washington Square Park folk guitarist scene,Fritz the Cat(Hinnant)notices three young girls taking a shine to a crow nearby.When the object of their interest turns out to be gay,he makes inroads with the trio by pitching them a steady flow of existential bullshit,ultimately landing him in a ganja-veiled bathtub orgy with them at a hippie squat.When two beat cops(pigs)raid the party,Fritz manages to sneak one of the officer's pistols out of his holster in the clouded confusion,shooting the toilet,and washing the entire writhing,stoned mass out into the streets.Fritz ducks into a synagogue full of lions,only escaping the long arm of the law when a radio announces that the United States is about to fund more weapons to Israel,causing the rabbis to jump up and dance.Back at his college dorm,his roommates are too zooted on bennies studying for exams to notice Fritz,or pay any attention to his exploits,causing him to gather his notes and papers into a massive pile and set them on fire,vowing to live life to the fullest from there on in,as the entire building is set ablaze.He enters a crow bar in Harlem,where he befriends a pool hustler named Duke,who saves the cat's feline hide when he mistakenly calls the bartender,"Boy"(!),then sends the entire bar into hysterics when he says "bug out",a cat using crow lingo,dig that!Duke and Fritz steal a car and head to Bertha's,a fat crow prostitute,to blow some pot.Bertha stuffs multiple reefers into the bewildered cat's yap,causing him to hornily seduce her in a nearby junkyard.She laughs at his manhood,exclaiming,"You aint black enough,honey!" before giving him a piece anyway.In midstroke,Fritz has a revolutionary revelation,and rouses the neighborhood crows to riot in the streets.Duke is shot and killed by the police,and Mickey Mouse,Minnie Mouse,and Donald Duck(all in silhouette)cheer as the Air Force drop napalm on the ghetto.
A minyan of kosher lions tear through the Torah.
Hiding out in an alley garbage can,he's found by Winston Schwartz,a fox he goes out with now and again,who convinces him to pack up and move to San Francisco with her.In the middle of the desert,Winston's car runs out of gas,and after a redneck dog with a pickup full of chickens in cages(that he clobbers to death with a two by four with a nail in it)diagnoses their engine,Fritz is left to walk back to the gas station with a bucket.Weary of Winston's droning,he decides to abandon her for a smackhead nazi-biker rabbit named Blue and his old lady,Harriet the Horse.Together they ride Blue's chopper to his terrorist cell's underground hideout,where his two snake pals in hooded robes plan to start the revolution by blowing up a power plant.Harriet doesn't like the idea,and after voicing her opinion,gets the snot knocked out of her by Blue who punches and chain-whips her.When Fritz voices his discomfort with the situation,the head snake puts a candle out in his face,leaving him to watch in horror as the three beat and rape her as she's helpless to defend herself,chained to a cot.Later,Fritz drives with one of the snakes to the power plant,where the cat climbs the structure and puts dynamite in place.As Fritz has a change of heart,the snake lights the fuse and drives off,leaving the feline to struggle to remove the dynamite as the fuse burns down.The power plant blows up,and Fritz with it.In a hospital in L.A.,his room is guarded by a policeman,who denies entry to the original three girls from the NY park who have rushed to see him in his critical condition.A nun arrives to offer last rites,and the girls sneak in with her.She removes her hood to reveal that she is Harriet,as Fritz groggily regains consciousness amidst his life support machines and full body cast.He struggles to relate the valuable lesson he's learned from all of his adventures:a reprisal of his decadent hedonist lifestyle,as he throws the girls down on his bed and fucks them all in a flurry of bodies and bandages.
Fritz(Skip Hinnant)has fought many a good man,and laid many a good woman.I can relate,baby.
Bakshi who voiced the opening narrative("Happy times,heavy times."),would also lend vocal talents as one of the pair of bumbling pig policemen therein.He would not return for the sequel(which we'll check out later on down the line,kiddies),and went on to direct Heavy Traffic,the controversial Coonskin,Wizards,Fire and Ice,and American Pop,among others.Most of the dialogue in Fritz was recorded raw in real life situations,the background chanting in the synagogue scene taken from a recording of Bakshi's own father.Hinnant would go on to voice Fritz in the sequel,appearing sparsely on television,ultimately becoming the president of the S.A.G. in New York.Crumb allegedly didn't like the film treatment of his popular cat very much,claiming the movie was a departure from the stories in Head Comix and Cavalier that the script drew upon.When watching the thing straight,it's hard not to notice the haphazard manner in which it's paced,but overall it remains a pretty damned enjoyable slice of seventies grindhouse entertainment.On the ratings scale,Fritz hits the pipe,and exhales a very respectable three wops worth.Dig it!
Heckle and Jeckle done come a long way,baby,can you dig it?
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