Product Description
Payday (DVD)
His life is on the road, and his career is on the skids -- but maybe a country singer's next song can take him out of the honkytonks and back onto the Country Music charts. Rip Torn ("Defending Your Life," the "Men in Black" movies) gives one of his most powerful and memorable performances in this unblinking chronicle of a not-so-nice country singer's life off-stage.
Amazon.com He'll be nigh on unrecognizable to fans of The Larry Sanders Show and Men in Black (not to mention his dozens of other roles), but the actor who gives a, well, rip-roaring performance in Payday is the very same Rip Torn. Directed by Daryl Duke, this 1973 film was one of Torn's few outings as a leading man, and he has a field day as Maury Dann, a mid-level country singer traveling the Deep South honky tonk circuit. We only spend about a day and a half in this unsavory character's company, but that's plenty. Indeed, in those 36 action-packed hours, Dann plays a gig (Torn does his own singing--he's no George Jones, but that's entirely appropriate for the part), goes quail-hunting, drops in to a radio station for an interview, visits his estranged wife and drug-addled mother, pops handfuls of pills and smokes plenty of reefer, and beds no less than three women, one of them in the backseat of his Cadillac while another sleeps right beside them. He is basically a hard living lout, a guy whose sense of entitlement far exceeds his actual stature, and it comes as little surprise when his lies, cynicism, and general abuse of everyone in his orbit catch up to him in the end. Payday effectively immerses the viewer in a world of card-playing good ol' boys, easy women, and cheap motel rooms with cheesy wood paneling. But it's more a series of vignettes than a real story, and while there are some amusing characterizations by the other actors (Cliff Emmich shines as Maury's faithful driver, while Elayne Heilveil is effective as a clueless female conquest), this is Torn's show from beginning to end. For many, that will be enough. The principal bonus feature is a commentary track with director Duke and Saul Zaentz, whose company produced the film. --Sam Graham
