In the early Sixties, art/film critic Manny Farber wrote a piece called "Termite Art vs. White Elephant Art." The former was ostensibly lowbrow, hidden in pulp genres, its meaning often obscured by plot conventions. The latter was middlebrow, exposed in best-seller hot air, its meaning always on the surface and drawing attention to itself as officially cultural. On the cool plane, the termite artists fly higher. You'll see what we mean when you climb into the cockpit with... Chet & Jack By Dick Blackburn
In the early Sixties, art/film critic Manny Farber wrote a piece called "Termite Art vs. White Elephant Art." The former was ostensibly lowbrow, hidden in pulp genres, its meaning often obscured by plot conventions. The latter was middlebrow, exposed in best-seller hot air, its meaning always on the surface and drawing attention to itself as officially cultural. On the cool plane, the termite artists fly higher. You'll see what we mean when you climb into the cockpit with...
Chet & Jack By Dick Blackburn
Chester Gould and Jack Webb's ultra-conserv right-winger surfaces thinly disguised what were essentially two radical surrealists. Their superego cop automatons -- Dick Tracy and Joe Friday -- were as rigid and affectless as their villains were grandiose and hysterical. Reassurance, maybe, that irrational feelings/emotions could be controlled. The exaggerated tension between craziness and control is why we love 'em both today. That, and because we sense their obvious identification with weirdos.
Consider: Chester had a little graveyard in his backyard made up of miniature tombstones. Each one bore the date of a villain's intro and outro in the Tracy strip. Is this affection or what? And some of his comic good guys inadvertently blow the status quo as much as the crooks do.
Bandleader Spike Dyke (Jones) or Vitamin Flintheart, a pill- popping healthnut/hambone actor, is the worst judge of character on God's globe. B.O. Plenty, a skinny briar patch in a hat, hasn't the combined IQ of the fleas in his beard, and is always screwing up. Diet Smith, billionaire industrialist, is a physically powerless infant king, constantly burping and scarfing baby food for his ulcer.
Consider this as well: Webb's barely controlled fury and righteous seething against the forces of evil was like a personal dialogue -- as if he was going to fly off the handle and slug himself. Check him out in The D.I., a movie that predates Stan "The Man" Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket by more'n 30 years. Jack musta written his dialogue all in CAPS: it's all shouted. In one scene, he grabs his leading lady, smashes his mouth onto hers and snaps his head back as if he wanted to kill sex before it starts. Anti-Whap-A-Dang.
Chet Gould was like the Little Engine That Could. An early lack of success turned him into a tireless workaholic who lived to draw. Ultimately, he parlayed a lack of draftsmanship into one of the most powerful graphic styles comics have ever seen. His stark blacks and whites perfectly complemented Gould's Manichean universe of light and dark.
The German 16th century artist Matthais Von Grunewald painted a pus-filled, lacerated Crucifixion to contrast the mortification of earthly flesh with divine salvation. Gould, too, reveled in physical suffering. Dick Tracy, battered, shot, suffocated ad nauseum, is constantly dying for our sins and rising from the dead. A comic strip Jehovah, Chet digs destroying/cleansing by fire. By the late 1940s, his Tracy-tormenting agents of evil had grown so bizarre that villain Sketch Paree, for instance, was a psycho dress designer (fear of foreigners, madness, gays) who spoke to a little doll in his pocket and wore a water-filled mask to drown his victims! The livin' endpoint of all this was probably Rhodent, a man with the face of a rat and parents (literally) blind to his physical and moral abnormality. Finally, the earthly horrors became too much for Chet. After a few interviews, in which he came off somewhere to the right of Yosemite Sam, he took off for the moon prophesying that "He who controls magnetism controls the universe."
Jack Webb's career was a series of reversals. In the late Forties, he wrote, directed and starred in a San Francisco radio show, Pier 51, later renamed Pat Novak For Hire, in which his baroque Chandleresque voiceover ("Her hair was the color of a brush fire just barely under control," "The neon motel sign looked like icing on a cheap wedding cake") became so clotted they buried the plots. Most stories involved a husky-voiced, come-hither "nightclub thrush," a sex fantasy Jack later made real by marrying songstress Julie London. By the early Fifties, Webb was a young actor portraying both punks and killers (Dark City and Appointment With Danger), as well as vaguely left-leaning intellectuals and H'wood bohos (The Men and Sunset Boulevard). But it was his first film, an obscure B police procedural -- He Walked By Night (1948) -- based on an actual LAPD case, that inspired Dragnet.
Suddenly, left went right. Decadent Chandlerisms were replaced by a classic Hammett style so tight-lipped it made The Master himself seem prolix. And Jack's Hemingwayesque repetitions make conversations sound like ping-pong matches played inside coffee percolators. The Webbed One was the first in tube talkdom to obsessively leave off the personal pronoun ("Didn't say. Left yesterday. Didn't say a word," etc.), and to close scenes with the pre-packaged zinger ("You think he'd see me?" "He's not seeing anyone." "How do you know that?" "He's dead"). When Dragnet went to TV, Webb's abstract minimalist style ("visual shouting and verbal whispering," wrote film crit Andrew Sarris) was seen as realism instead of a Kabuki drama on Thorazine. The banter between Joe Friday and his partner(s) Frank Smith/ Bill Gannon sounds like two deejays trying to keep awake on the night shift. By the end of his career, Webb had played Friday too long. When not knocking 'em back at the red leatherette Cock N' Bull restaurant on Sunset Strip, he was monitoring police calls and showing up at crime sites. Dom da dom dom.