Sean Burns
The sleaziest major Hollywood release of 1986, John Frankenheimer’s 52 Pick-Up is an ugly, urgent thriller made by a director with something to prove. Based on Elmore Leonard’s 1974 novel, it’s about what happens when a trio of low-rent, wannabe criminal masterminds try to blackmail the wrong guy. Roy Scheider stars as Harry Mitchell, a self-made Los Angeles machine parts magnate who isn’t too many years off the assembly line himself. These days Harry drives a vintage Jaguar and lives in a fancy house with a pool, while his wife Barbara (Ann-Margret) is a well-respected philanthropist being groomed to run for office. But we can tell Harry’s still a little rough around the edges because he’s seen drinking a beer in nearly every scene. Lately he’s been running around with a 22-year-old nude model (‘80s dreamgirl Kelly Preston) and that’s why our three skeezy operators try to make their move. Big mistake.
What sets 52 Pick-Up apart from countless other tawdry thrillers of its era are the film’s ruthless efficiency and astonishing cruelty. This movie has a mean streak a mile wide. After Harry tells the would-be blackmailers to pound sand – I believe “bag my ass” is his exact terminology – they steal his gun, then strip and murder his mistress in a scene so vicious and disturbing it caused lingering nightmares for a certain future critic who was far too young to be watching this movie on late night cable because he had heard there were boobs in it. (Be careful what you wish for, I guess.)
Produced by legendary schlockmeisters Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, 52 Pick-Up exhibits all the sordid, rapey hallmarks of a Cannon Films release, wallowing in a scuzzy underworld of nudie booths and porno shoots. But it also has an incongruously classy, committed cast, with Scheider and Ann-Margaret giving grown-up performances as an emotionally estranged couple learning to love each other again when their backs are against the wall. It’s a mature marriage story, albeit one with cameos by Ron Jeremy and Amber Lynn.
The film came about during the great Detroit crime novelist’s ill-fated, early ‘80s Hollywood sojourn that inspired Leonard to write Get Shorty. Amid the drama with Dustin Hoffman and the notorious, never-filmed adaptation of Leonard’s LaBrava, Golan and Globus also optioned his early book 52 Pick-Up and hired the writer to script an adaptation set in Tel Aviv, for some reason. Leonard turned in two drafts before quitting. The resulting picture, 1984’s The Ambassador, bears little resemblance to 52 Pick-Up save for a blackmail plot, and is notable only for featuring the last screen appearance of Rock Hudson, who died from AIDS-related complications the following year.
Supposedly it was Frankenheimer who talked Golan and Globus into trying again with a more faithful adaptation of the book. The filmmaker had fallen far from his 1960s heights helming A-list classics like The Manchurian Candidate and The Train. Battles with the bottle had him bottoming out with dreck like 1979’s nonsensical mutant grizzly bear flick Prophecy. Fresh from rehab, Frankenheimer attacked 52 Pick-Up with a brusque, renewed vigor and shrewd staging that makes the most of its B-movie budget. He was one of the best we ever had at camera blocking and establishing character dynamics by their positions within the frame; there’s so much we already know in this movie just by looking at it. Watch how he keeps Harry and Barbara separated visually for the first half of the picture, only allowing them to share the same shots when their relationship begins to thaw.
What most people remember about the movie is a lip-smacking, marvelously malevolent performance by John Glover as ringleader of the group trying to blackmail Harry. His Alan Raimy is a fey pornographer and cackling sadist who calls everybody condescending nicknames like “Sport” and “Slim.” But I think Clarence Williams III is even scarier as the crew’s cokehead muscle man Bobby Shy, delivering his lines in a raspy, disbelieving squeak and oozing pure menace. There’s a scene in which he interrogates co-star Vanity by repeatedly suffocating her with an oversized teddy bear that’s more upsetting than (most of) the movie’s many murders.
This is rough stuff, but there’s an integrity to it. Frankenheimer isn’t getting off on the sex or the violence and he won’t allow you to, either. These strip clubs and porno theaters are sordid, sticky little cesspools through which Scheider must maneuver as punishment for Harry’s hubris. It’s a perfect role for a ‘70s star adrift in the ’80s. Scheider’s leather-tanned, regular guy machismo was outmoded in an age of slick, pumped-up superstars, much in the way Harry comes off like a dinosaur stomping around this decadent, neon underworld. There’s real wit to the actor’s work here, moving slowly and staring in silence while these sputtering motormouths talk themselves into trouble. I love the slyly mocking way he leans in and rests his chin in the palm of his hand when one conspirator can’t stop confessing.
52 Pick-Up is a fine piece of filmmaking and an unabashed exploitation movie, a combination that didn’t sit well with many critics. Gene Siskel said he admired the craft of the picture but found the sexualized violence too much to bear. Paul Attanasio, the Washington Post film critic and future screenwriter of Quiz Show, Donnie Brasco and Sphere, called the film “nakedly violent and violently naked, tailor-made for connoisseurs of the female breast, and for those who can’t wait to see women scared, strangled, shot and otherwise abused.”
Admittedly, it does go overboard in the final reel, when Leonard’s adroit plotting slips off the rails and Barbara is kidnapped and shot up with heroin by Raimy. (I don’t imagine a lot of her fans came to the movie expecting to watch a dopesick Ann-Margret puke.) It’s implied that he may have raped her, but that’s quickly elided because nobody wants to really deal with that. The sequence doesn’t work as well as the rest of 52 Pick-Up because separating them pulls us away from the emotional spine of the picture, which is Harry and Barbara’s reconciliation.
But then, Harry’s ultimate revenge is such a silly, cathartically satisfying way to end a movie, it took me this many viewings to realize Frankenheimer staged it as an homage to Jaws.
“52 Pick-Up” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and PlutoTV.
