"Mitchell," straight

When bad movies happen to good actors

Joe Don Baker as Mitchell, or rather, perhaps, “Mitchell!”

I’ve recently spent time on a project that, given that its existence has yet to be announced, I’m likely not supposed to talk about yet. What I will say is that the project enhanced my appreciation of the actor Joe Don Baker. Baker is known for a few things — his iconic and controversial portrayal of dyspeptic lawman Buford Pusser in Walking Tall, for instance — but among TV comedy wisenheimers he is practically almost only known as colorful L.A. plainclothes cop Mitchell — he seems to have no first name, unless Mitchell actually is his first name, which seems unlikely — in the 1973 film of the same name. A film that begins with the letters of the title gating a staggered-frame depiction of the character seemingly in the grip of a grande mal seizure (as we’ll learn later, he’s actually bringing a large rock down on someone’s head or something like that — don’t correct me). A film that formed the basis for one of the most iconic episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show that sent up “cheesy movies” by way of silhouetted wisecracking host Joel Hodgson and his “robot friends” Tom Servo and Crow. A lot of movie people despise MST3K — I remember the venerable Kim Newman expressing near-aghast disapproval back when the show was still a going concern — but I remember being pretty delighted when I happened upon it in the mid-1990s, having spent more than half a decade looking for a new TV comedy fix in the wake of the demise of SCTV.

The Mitchell episode, which also handed over the hosting gig from Hodgson to Michael J. Nelson, is still pretty funny. There’s a scene at the beginning where the sleazebag played by John Saxon and his pal park their lady escorts in the living room while they go to raid the liquor cabinet. Saxon tells the ladies to call on their limitless “imaginations” in the absence of the makes. One of the girls grouses to the other, “What does he think I am, an acrobat?” Cut to Saxon and buddy in the hallway, with Saxon chortling like a schoolboy. Setting up Crow: “AND she’s an acrobat, Ted!” Get me every time. And then of course there are the scrolls and scrolls of japes at the hefty Baker, who’s called upon to run a lot. “Heart’s exploding,” one of the wisecrackers intones in time to a soundtrack vamp under Mitchell in hard-breathing pursuit. Then there’s one of the sex scenes — yes, sex scenes — with hooker Linda Evans, accompanied by Hoyt Axton (son of one of the writers of “Heartbreak Hotel”) singing the movie’s theme song, whose refrain is “My my my my Mitchell.” Closeups of Baker and Evans canoodling inspire Crow to sing along: “My my my my GOD!!!!”

Now, having been positively impressed by Baker in a different movie, I thought: is the fault of Mitchell in the star, or something else? So I watched the movie straight, in its non-MST3K version, off of Amazon (I’m sorry, it won’t happen again). And came to the conclusion that Baker here is trying to do his best with what’s essentially an incoherent character. Mitchell, who we first see sleeping off a drunk in the back of a black-and-white, is certainly a slob of the first order. But. He is also a dogged cop. And by dogged, I do mean he’s like a dog with a bone. He’s got zilch to do with the case that the black-and-white car gets drawn into, but he barges in on it anyway and determines to bring down the Saxon character, who’s trying to depict a cold-blooded murder as a self-defense act. Discouraged from this case — Saxon’s Deaney is the FBI’s gig, he is told — he chases it anyway. Officially assigned to “watch” a possible heroin smuggler named Cummins (a possibly genuinely dyspeptic Martin Balsam), he makes himself an active nuisance trying to draw the guy out. In the midst of all this, his crude behavior somehow enamors him of escort Linda Evans, who’s supposed to be some kind of bribe.

The point of all this is that while Mitchell may look like an idiot, and act like an idiot, most of the time he’s just playing possum, seeking to be taken as an idiot, the better to make his criminal prey comfortable to the point of complacency, after which he will pounce. The problem is, by way of Ian Kennedy Smith’s script and Andrew V. McClagen’s direction, and as per Groucho Marx, Mitchell often is an idiot. He fingers the wrong man as the fellow who’s paying for his hooker. He dumps his car ashtray on to the middle of the street. He tries to prevail in a car chase in a gigantic Buick. And so on. He’s quite vindictive too. When he tracks down one of the guys who ran him off the road in the aforementioned car chase, he breaks the guy’s wrist with his car door. Ouch. Baker never goes off book, and if the character achieves or retains any coherence at all (he kind of doesn’t), it’s not really the actor’s fault. Among the movie’s most delightful non-Baker features are poor Harold J. Stone seemingly auditioning for voice work as Mario decades too early, and the tester from Blade Runner, Morgan Paull, playing an especially sleazy mob guy.

As I mentioned, having come to a new appreciation for Baker (check him out also in Scorsese’s Cape Fear, giving a disciplined and often drily funny performance dotted with subtle touches — check out the way he enunciates the final “t” when he calls De Niro’s Max Cady a “white trash piece of shit”), I sought to assign fault with regard to Mitchell to another party. Now I love Victor McClagen as much as the next John Ford fan so I’m inclined to cut his relatives plenty of flack, and Mitchell director McClagen happens to be Victor’s son. Who, in an archival interview on Severin’s new edition of his mercenary (in more ways than one) action picture The Wild Geese, reels off the John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart movies he directed in the 1960s. Mitchell was 1975 and not mentioned by him. So perhaps we can infer that he was not at the peak of his powers when making it. (McClagen was, upon his death, likened by a critic for The Independent to Ted Post. You don’t remember Ted Post? Well, if you’re my age, you probably remember being knocked out by two or three Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone movies and, excited to see the new one in 1968, were violently disappointed by Hang ‘Em High. Directed by Ted Post. )

It is rumored that Baker was less than amused at being lampooned by MST3K, which did not dissuade the crew from eventually sending up Final Justice, a genuinely confounding film directed by Greydon Clark (you know — Satan’s Cheerleaders!) in which Baker’s Texas sheriff stomps around Malta for no discernible reason. But I feel like I’m living proof that you can love both Joe Don Baker for real, and as a figure of fun for one 90-minute slab.