JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 338 из 359Newsweek publishesa picture of a shyly-smiling U.S.
soldier holding up a revered human ear. And in a Los Angeles suburb, a young boy puts out his brother's eyes with his fingers. He was, he explained, only trying to imitate the old Three Stooges two-fingered boinnng! When they do it on TV, the weeping child explains, no one gets hurt.
11
Television's make-believe violence rolled on nevertheless, through the sixties, past Charles Whitman up on the Texas Tower ("There was a rumor/about a tumor," Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys sang gleefully, "nestled at the base of his braiyyyyn . . .") , and what finally killed it and ushered in the Sitcom Seventies was a seemingly unimportant event when compared to the deaths of a President, a Senator, a great civil rights leader. Television execs were finally forced to rethink their position because a young girl ran out of gas in Roxbury.
She had a gas can in her trunk, unfortunately. She got it filled at a gas station, and while walking back to her beached car, she was set upon by a gang of black youths who took her gas can away from her, doused her with the gas, and then-like the woman and her mother trying to drive the demon out of the baby-lit her on fire. Days later she died. The youths were caught, and someone finally asked them the sixty-fourdollar question: Where did you get such a horrible idea?
From TV, came the response. From The ABC Movie of the Week .
Near the end of the sixties, Ed McBain (in reality novelist Evan Hunter) wrote one of his finest 87th Precinct novels of the policeman's lot. It was called Fuzz, and dealt in part with a gang of teenagers who went around dousing winos with gasoline and lighting them up. The film version, which is described by Steven Scheuer in his invaluable tubeside companion Movies on TV as a "scatterbrained comedy," starring Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. The biggest yocks in the movie come when several cops on stakeout dress up as nuns and then chase after a suspect, holding their habits up to reveal big, clunky workshoes. Pretty funny, right, gang? A real gut-buster.
McBain's novel isn't a gut-buster. It's grim and almost beautiful. Certainly he has never come any closer to defining exactly what the policeman's lot may be than near the end of the novel when Steve Carella, masquerading as a wino, is lit on fire himself. The producers of the movie apparently saw something between M*A*S*H and Naked City in this, and the misbegotten result is in most respects as forgettable as a Tracy Stallard fastball . . .
soldier holding up a revered human ear. And in a Los Angeles suburb, a young boy puts out his brother's eyes with his fingers. He was, he explained, only trying to imitate the old Three Stooges two-fingered boinnng! When they do it on TV, the weeping child explains, no one gets hurt.
11
Television's make-believe violence rolled on nevertheless, through the sixties, past Charles Whitman up on the Texas Tower ("There was a rumor/about a tumor," Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys sang gleefully, "nestled at the base of his braiyyyyn . . .") , and what finally killed it and ushered in the Sitcom Seventies was a seemingly unimportant event when compared to the deaths of a President, a Senator, a great civil rights leader. Television execs were finally forced to rethink their position because a young girl ran out of gas in Roxbury.
She had a gas can in her trunk, unfortunately. She got it filled at a gas station, and while walking back to her beached car, she was set upon by a gang of black youths who took her gas can away from her, doused her with the gas, and then-like the woman and her mother trying to drive the demon out of the baby-lit her on fire. Days later she died. The youths were caught, and someone finally asked them the sixty-fourdollar question: Where did you get such a horrible idea?
From TV, came the response. From The ABC Movie of the Week .
Near the end of the sixties, Ed McBain (in reality novelist Evan Hunter) wrote one of his finest 87th Precinct novels of the policeman's lot. It was called Fuzz, and dealt in part with a gang of teenagers who went around dousing winos with gasoline and lighting them up. The film version, which is described by Steven Scheuer in his invaluable tubeside companion Movies on TV as a "scatterbrained comedy," starring Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. The biggest yocks in the movie come when several cops on stakeout dress up as nuns and then chase after a suspect, holding their habits up to reveal big, clunky workshoes. Pretty funny, right, gang? A real gut-buster.
McBain's novel isn't a gut-buster. It's grim and almost beautiful. Certainly he has never come any closer to defining exactly what the policeman's lot may be than near the end of the novel when Steve Carella, masquerading as a wino, is lit on fire himself. The producers of the movie apparently saw something between M*A*S*H and Naked City in this, and the misbegotten result is in most respects as forgettable as a Tracy Stallard fastball . . .