Actor and director John Turturro's Dirty Dozen — 12 movie favorites that have a special place in his heart. - Review - movie review

Film Comment, May, 2001 by John Turturro

Guilt and pleasure seem to be opposites, but in life they go together like magnets. I was raised as a Catholic, so deep down, I accept suffering. (But I am also of Italian descent and the guilt level is a lot lower, religiously speaking, than, let's say, an Irish Catholic. Those guys suffer.)

Bye Bye Birdie (George Sidney, 1963) My first guilty pleasure took place on a hot Saturday night with my family at the Sunrise Drive-In. The picture began. A young, firm, full-bodied, red-headed girl sang out to the audience and it seemed like she was singing to me. My mouth opened wide and the little hairless fellow between my legs climbed to attention. This was my introduction to Ann-Margret. Was it love at first sight? Seven-year-old lust? An appreciation of her talent? Her quivering voice? Her red hair? I immediately identified with Bobby Rydell and was disheartened when Ann-Margret swooned over the character of Conrad Birdie, who was, even to my young eyes, an Elvis imposter. I did like his gold outfit, though. And Paul Lynde as Ann-Margret's father is one of the great leaps of faith in cinema history. She returned a few years later in Viva Las Vegas shaking her hair and body all over for the real King, Elvis Presley. Now this was a match I could accept as a young boy. If I couldn't have Ann-Margret, than who better to lose her to than my man, the big E. As a teen, when I saw Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge and she had gained that little extra weight and I watched Jack Nicholson smother himself in her breasts, with her voice purring, it was the ultimate guilty pleasure. There were other larger-than-life women I desired: Julie Newmar, Pam Grier, Liz Taylor in The Sandpiper, Angie Dickinson, and Barbra Streisand in The Owl and the Pussycat -- but Ann-Margret was my first cinematic love.

The Sea Wolf (Michael Curtiz, 1941) I'm a big Edward G. Robinson fan. Here he plays a tyrannical captain -- he actually throws Barry Fitzgerald to the sharks and they eat his leg. The crew brings him back and he has one leg for the rest of the film. Robinson fights the entire crew and goes blind. It's such a savage film. I grew up in Hollis, in a mostly black neighborhood, and when we moved to Rosedale, an Italian' Irish neighborhood, I had a lot of problems because I was the darkest kid there and they used to torment me. I was seven years old or something and my father wouldn't help me. He said you have to fight your own battles. I said I was outnumbered and he said, "Well, then get something" -- meaning a stick. I remember watching The Sea Wolf with him and it actually gave me courage to fight these guys on the street.

The Kentuckian (Burt Lancaster, 1955) It's not a good movie. It's one of those movies that Burt made where he was a little stiff. I really like Walter Matthau even though he's miscast as the bad guy -- he's a Kentuckian but he sounds like Walter Matthau. There's a fight scene where he whips Burt, and Burt keeps jumping and doing acrobatics, trying to dive out of the way. It's kind of surreal, the way it's staged.

The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966) & The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967) Lee Marvin is notorious for guilty pleasures. In The Professionals, he's the brains of the operation. It's very entertaining, really well crafted. It's like the all-time tough-guy cast: Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Jack Palance, Woody Strode. Just the interplay between Marvin and Lancaster is wonderful. The Dirty Dozen is an adventure film, but it's not formula. It's all about outcasts: John Cassavetes is very interesting, Telly Savalas is the psychopath, Donald Sutherland is the weirdo, Clint Walker is the big guy who doesn't want to hurt anybody. And Lee Marvin just has a great ease about him. I can still watch it with tremendous glee.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967) & The Sergeant (John Flynn, 1968) Often people give great performances in films that don't work and they're never acknowledged as great performances. Both of these films are about repressed homosexuals in the army. Reflections in a Golden Eye is not one of Huston's best movies, but Marlon Brando has some moments that are worth the price of admission -- when he's working out and he's putting cold cream on his body (this was what I would call his pudgy stage). He's an army officer who thinks this enlisted man who he's in love with is going to visit him. As he's waiting, he fixes a strand of his hair, and the guy passes his room on his way to fuck Brando's wife. It's an incredible scene. In The Sergeant, Rod Steiger's performance is really bold. He plays this macho guy who's very tormented. It's all about his denial and repression and at the end he finally grabs this guy he's in love with and kisses him deeply on the mouth, and it was shocking. I remember watching it with my father, who was fascinated because he had been in the navy. He said, "He was a man in every way -- except one."

King Creole (Michael Curtiz, 1958) I love King Creole because I'm an Elvis freak. Parts of the movie are really corny and bad, but Elvis is good and he has some great songs, including my favorite, "Trouble." He's a singing waiter in a nightclub run by Walter Matthau and he has a tremendously erotic relationship with Carolyn Jones, an older woman who is Matthau's girlfriend. Carolyn Jones was vastly underrated. Later she was Morticia on The Addams Family.