Top of the World, Ma!
A
football player from Ohio who needs an operation goes to find the New York
mobster who owes him money.
On Location
If
you come to the city of New York from outside the pale as conceived by the city
of New York, you have to be prepared. “Bubba” White has weak knees like
“Broadway” Joe Namath (or John Doe with a bad elbow) but the Red Devils of
Dayton don’t pay him much. For an operation, he strongarms some deadbeats on
the rolls of Barney Sweetwater’s Dayton collection agency, but Sweetwater
doesn’t pay up. No, he tells Bubba, it’s the big guy in New York, Jack Faraday,
and that little aide-de-camp of his, Gruber, they stiffed you. So Bubba and his
mother Ernestine put up at the St. Richard Hotel (“so elegant,” says Mrs.
White, “it doesn’t even look American”) in the finest suite available (“the
Presidential Suite is being fumigated,” says the bellboy—“top of the world,
ma!” says Bubba) while he calmly sets about in Sweetwater’s car to track down
and collect his $10,000 commission.
Larry
and Dave are Gruber’s henchmen. Every day at one o’clock, Bubba is told, the
pair eat lunch at the Lavender Doily Bar (“it's a saloon,” says Gruber, or “a
joint on Seventh Avenue”). While waiting, Bubba goes next door and meets Jackie
Dawn at Fifi’s Live Models. Later on, he’s framed for Sweetwater’s murder and
shot once or twice, but his innocent soul knows “everything’s going to be all
right” in the end.
Bo
Svenson’s performance is huge, lumbering, graceful and dignified, everything it
should be. Stefanie Powers goes about as far as she can with the sort of
environment depicted in 52 Pick-Up and Hardcore, and so does Alex
March. Rather than dwell on details, he moves his unit outside on location to
get some real local beauty on film, and give his office interiors (especially
Jack Faraday’s) some tint of nature. This is where Faraday tells cigar-smoking
Gruber, “keep that thing out of my office,” and where he cajoles Sweetwater
into confessing his theft of “five or six per cent” off the top, monthly.
McCloud
stumbles into all of this because Chief Clifford puts him on Stolen Car Detail,
calling him “an exchange student.” Sgt. Broadhurst slaps the report book for
the last six months down on McCloud’s desk. Where is the marshal supposed to
begin, at the back or the front? “With the next one that comes in,” says the
sergeant.
|
Bo Svenson Charles “Bubba” White |
Story by Raymond Danton Directed by Alex March |
33405, 11.3.71
Theater Marquees: Robert Sparr’s More Dead Than Alive,
Gordon Parks’ Shaft, Jack Haley, Jr.’s The Love Machine, James
Goldstone’s Brother John, Dick Clement’s A Severed Head, and
Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World.
The nameplate on Chief Clifford’s
desk reads PETER J. CLIFFORD.
ERNESTINE WHITE: (On the New York hotel where her son
Bubba has ensconced her.) It doesn’t even seem American. It’s
so elegant!
McCLOUD: If we’d a had this Jack Faraday character down in Taos,
New Mexico, we’d a had him a lot longer than two and a half hours. We’d a had
him tied s’tight he couldn’t fight the flies off.
CHIEF
CLIFFORD: Is that right?
McCLOUD: That’s
right, and branded, you betcha.
McCLOUD: Slept like a log, ate like a hog.
(Sign
in shop window:)
|
Fifi’s |
(At Fifi’s.)
McCLOUD: Excuse
me, Miss Dawn?
JACKIE
DAWN: Yeah. What are you dressed for?
(At Fifi’s Live Models.)
CHARLES
“BUBBA” WHITE: I never met a New York model before.
JACKIE
DAWN: Yeah, well neither have I.
McCLOUD: (To Barney Sweetwater.) Yeah,
seems like people never are what they ought to be.
McCLOUD: (To Flynn.) I’m overly interested in
these New York detective things, these crimes of purple passion, axe murders
and things like that, they—they fascinate me, I love
‘em.