Criminal Minds · Naked City · Joe Pepitone
Caril Ann Fugate three ways, plus Foxy drops the mic
the true crime that's worth your time
Knox from three…
…IT’S GOOOOOOD!
Legendary. No notes. — SDB
Speaking of legends, former ballplayer, Sinatra-sasser, and nightlife-enjoyer Joe Pepitone passed away a few days ago. Pepitone, raised in now-tony Park Slope, Brooklyn, got himself shot in a schoolyard fight as a kid, then, later, spent some time in jail on drug charges (and for brawling with a guy who called him a has-been at a resort), but his collisions with social (and tonsorial) mores of the sixties and seventies don’t really qualify as “true crime” — except in contrast to the way we’d think of or write about his (mis-)adventures today.
Pepitone himself seemed to recognize the gap between the lovable-rogue press he’s always gotten, and the reality of living with a guy like himself — as he admitted to Rolling Stone’s Dan Epstein in 2015:
There’s times where I’m in my car, driving, and I see everything in Technicolor in front of me – my father, my wives, how I was at that time with the drugs and all that other bullshit. My third wife, who I love to this day, I think about the time I hit her – it was just one smack, but I want to cut my hands off, because I’m not that kind of person.
That section is not long after Pepitone has just told a rollicking story about the Bleacher Bums at Wrigley Field
started throwing things at me every day; I’d get hit with a little packet, I’d look and there’s a gram of coke in there. I was like, “Holy shit!” Right into the ivy with it! [Laughs] I’m telling you, I got speed, I got everything.
It’s unusual for a figure-of-fun type of Pepitone’s vintage — he was 82 — both to understand why he’s still paid any mind, and to take a minute to deepen that portrait, at his own expense.
…Wait, maybe Pepi is technically a felon; Hardball Times’s Bruce Markusen notes in a look back at Pepitone’s final baseball card that Pepitone ditched his last team, Japan’s Yakult Atoms, with a massive phone bill. All fans got in return: the Japanese coinage “pepitone,” which became a synonym for “screw-up” (Pepitone spent more time in clubs than at the stadium). Oh, and his full-frontal pictorial for Foxylady magazine, which is currently going for $33 on eBay. — SDB
I’ve recently finished watching The 12th Victim ahead of recording an episode of Crime Seen, and I don’t think I treated the docuseries unfairly after reviewing only the first half — but it does do a handful of interesting, unique things in the second half, so I’d like to change my recommendation. The thing’s still too long, and I still agree with RogerEbert.com’s Tallerico that it’s trying to do too much — but it comes closer than I thought to getting by with all of it. The controversy over TV-sweeps-period “violence porn” that centered on ABC’s Murder in the Heartland should probably get its own feature. The Jungian preoccupation with Bonnie Parker-style murder molls should get its own feature (at least one). The sexy-danger lane midcentury true-crime pulp mags careened down should for sure get its own feature.
But I understand why The 12th Victim couldn’t resist those topics, and the frustration is more with the format than with the filmmaker/s. The first two eps need cutting down and it’s a little impressed with itself in the early going, but it’s worth sticking around for a few of the talking-heads in the back half, and it has a cumulative power in the end. Plus, how else would I have learned that F. Lee Bailey had a syndicated show called Lie Detector in the early eighties?
Or just how many properties over the decades have thrown their arms around the case — procedurals from the early sixties on, indie films, TV movies, even Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” (which he is shown talking about in T12V in performance footage that looks like it’s from the mid-eighties, and…sir, what is that ack-sint? Literal infants know you are the ne plus ultra of New Jerseyans!). I thought I’d check out a couple of them and let you know whether you should bother.
Criminal Minds S06.E13, “The Thirteenth Step”
Lord, no. …Well, good talk!
…Oh, all right, but I don’t have all that much to add. I unearthed a list of CM episodes based on real cases last year, and in the interim, I’ve looked at the Luke Perry/David Fauxresh ep for Again With Again With This — and that single episode of the series told me what I needed to know about watching any more of it (no thanks), while utterly failing to explain to me why seemingly everyone else in America watched it for so many seasons. I have a pretty high tolerance for lecturing procedurals — I still watch SVU, after all — and I don’t judge anyone; I just don’t get it. Every episode of CM I’ve seen is basically an extra-credit oral report on profiling basics.
Occasionally it’s bailed out by the guest stars, and I hoped for that with “The Thirteenth Step,” but Adrianne Palicki is blocked like she’s Samara in The Ring and directed with a similar lack of subtlety; even her nebulously Western “accent” is over the top. She’s also obliged to deliver the following steaming pile:
All this killin’ and drinkin’ is fun? But it doesn’t change the fact that, you know, my father used to rape me or what your daddy did to you.
That’s a goddamn shame, is what that is, and whoever wrote that needs to give the money back, period.
The Starkweather to her Fugate — in theory; in practice, this is much more a Bonnie/Clyde story, or a straight homage to Natural Born Killers, than it is a Starkweather/Fugate take — doesn’t fare any better. Jonathan Tucker, one of the best furiously traumatized criers in the business, is good casting for this, but the writing doesn’t give him any room. He has to go huge from the jump, and it’s exhausting.
The lone bright spot is Harley Graham as a little girl held hostage by the murderous pair in their last stand. She’s compelling without getting cutesy, and actually centers your attention on the aftermath for victims in spite of the show’s relentless fluffing of its BAU “heroes.”
Naked City S03.E18, “A Case Study Of Two Savages”
Aired 50 years before Criminal Minds’s version, Naked City’s feels fresher — and better paced, despite a runtime ten minutes longer than CM’s. Your mileage may vary with that; Naked City’s willingness to let a scene Mamet-ishly unspool at its own shaggy pace for the sake of lieutenant-koan texture is not everyone’s taste. Could that one phone conversation between jurisdictions move faster? Sure. Would a modern procedural cut it entirely? No doubt. Am I going to put the Arkansas sheriff saying of a poor holler family whose kids ran wild, “Truth is, we don’t sweep the corners up there” in my pocket and use it later? A hundred percent.
Naked City’s take on the Starkweather murders is helped by the show’s comfort with its stories not always resolving neatly. Criminal Minds is per se about profiling and can almost never leave motives dangling, but NC makes room more often for the concept that sometimes, a guy is just bad, or won’t get caught, and the “why” won’t stop the next case from landing on your desk. “A Case Study” is to an extent scare-mongering about Today’s Disaffected Youth, and the Tuesday Weld character’s button after the climactic shoot-out is a bit on the nose…but that’s the other thing. Naked City’s chief selling point at this distance is acting greats — or at least “very good”s — in their nearly unrecognizable youth. Here, it’s Rip Torn, serving hillbilly Ryan O’Neal as the Starkweather stand-in; Weld as his ragdoll-toting child bride; Charles “Floyd from The Sting” Dierkop; and Audra Marie “Mrs. Roper” Lindley drawling exhaustedly into a party-line telephone.
Weld is a stand-out in reaction shots as Torn’s Ansel beats or shoots another luckless victim, looking by turns sleepy, hungry, and barely diverted as one is by a waiting-room TV. As the Fugate manqué, her character is cast as a culpable accomplice, and Ora Mae’s reasons for taking off with a violent con artist she’d known for a week are at best hinted at — in other words, while we might feel compassion for her offscreen traumas, she’s not a victim. And yet she is, because she’s 15. Weld’s performance is perfectly suggestive of adolescent formlessness and over-attachment, and it somewhat undercuts the indictment of Fugate/Bonnie Parker that is the role on paper. “A Case Study” isn’t an essential 50 minutes, but it’s got a lot of cool vintage signage and fashion — and it feels like someone actually thought about it, versus snapping modular pieces together.
One last factoid: TIL Rip Torn is Sissy “Badlands” Spacek’s cousin. Weird link! — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Party at Eve’s, pass it on!
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