Payday, a small film featuring Rip Torn as an irascible country singer of some regional repute (but who nevertheless falls well short of stardom), premiered in New York City on February 22 1973, before screening in Cannes that May. Directed by journeyman Daryl Duke, who worked mostly in television (though his 1978 feature The Silent Partner with Elliott Gould has something of a cult following), co-produced Ralph J. Gleason (one of the founders of Rolling Stone), and featuring songs written by Shel Silverstein, Payday is a movie of particular interest to Mid Century Cinema for two reasons. First, it remains an under-appreciated seventies film. This is not to suggest it is some unsung masterpiece—but Payday is an excellent and important and exemplary-of-the-movement film that takes its place on that long shelf of New Hollywood achievements. Yet as Roger Ebert noted in his four-star review, the movie garnered “some very favorable reviews and then, inexplicably, never got a proper national release.”
A remarkable, deftly drawn character study, Payday follows, as its tag line proclaims, “36 hours in the life of a madman.” That well summarizes the movie, if a bit breathlessly. Maury Dann (Torn) isn’t quite mad—propelled by booze and speed, he’s self-indulgent, impulsive, serially cruel (attracting and discarding women with an indifference aback-taking even by jaded rock-star standards), enabled by a sycophantic entourage, and utterly dependent on his adult-in-the-room manager to “fix it” when things get too far out of hand. He’s also complex, charismatic, and compelling—whether on stage (Torn did his own singing), brawling with a band member over the fate of his mother’s dog (“So, should I put down quit or fired?” “A little of both, I guess”), or wrestling with his own demons deep into the night.
As noted, Payday is an archetypical (yet bracingly original) seventies film. Shot on a modest budget and entirely on location (eight weeks in Alabama, including Selma, Montgomery and the highways, dirt roads and juke-joints in-between), the narrative privileges character over (barely there) plot; and that character is not, by any stretch or measure, remotely likeable (yet we can’t take our eyes off him). And it ends, seventies style, on a fittingly low note (precipitated when Maury finally gets into a jam that even his manager cannot fix). It is also steeped in that New Hollywood hallmark, moral ambiguity, with the common if implicit theme in episodes small and large – in encounters with promoters, highway patrolmen, restaurant managers, assorted guardians of legal authority, and ultimately an endless stream of men and women – that all are ready and willing to sell out, for the right price. And when a mean drunk pulls a knife on Maury—well, let’s just say in what follows, no one is in the right, there are just varying shades of very wrong. But within this tumultuous mix, the most telling scene is actually one of the film’s quietest, during an impromptu visit to a radio station on the road, and the implicit payola and soft coercion that passes back and forth between performer and disc jockey. In some ways the movie turns on Torn’s seething reaction to that encounter, as he returns to his Cadillac and drops the affable smile sported in that small studio.
Payday is more than worth watching for a second reason—it features the best performance of Rip Torn, an actor of enormous talent and considerable achievement, yet who never quite achieved a place in the pantheon of the greats that he might have merited. This is not to minimize his many and varied accomplishments on both stage and screen—and his work as Artie on the Larry Sanders Show cannot be praised highly enough, and Torn remains memorable in countless roles, including in Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, as Nixon in Blind Ambition, and even with a small part in the marvelous Wonder Boys. But these triumphs obscure the fact that Rip Torn was once one of our most daring, riveting, risk taking, and even menacing performers (Alec Baldwin tells an uproarious Torn story to Jerry Seinfeld in a 2012 episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee), attributes that gave a crucial edge to his comedic turns, but which were rarely seen in late career, with the exception of Forty Shades of Blue (2005), a film that showcased the actor’s distinct, smoldering, preternatural intensity.
But in the 1960s and 1970s (and from the 1950s on stage) that intensity burned brightly. His clashes with Dennis Hopper during the shooting of Easy Rider inadvertently launched Jack Nicholson’s career (Torn had originally been cast in the part that fell to Jack, who happened to be there, keeping an eye on the production.) It was around that same time Norman Mailer cast the mercurial actor to appear in his film Maidstone, resulting in the legendary, unscripted melee between the two men that found its way into the finished film. Torn also took on roles that no other actor would dare to touch, such as the envelope-pushing, experimental Coming Apart; his strong seventies performances also included, among others, a very fine turn in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Payday, then, is especially valuable in that in addition to its considerable merits, it preserves for posterity what can be called Peak Torn. In its review at the time, The New York Times lauded the film as a “nasty little chrome-plated razor blade of a movie” and noted that what was ostensibly a road picture, was, “on a deeper level . . . a film about certain forms of American striving and desperation.” Torn’s performance, the Times assessed, “is one of those incarnations so complete they make one fear for an actor’s future career; he virtually disappears into the role.” Accurate observations all, but they need not have worried—very few people saw it at the time.
