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Chief chum is Uncle Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), a scorpion of yesteryear gone jellied in the head. When he sees Cooper, youthful memories flow like a slashed artery: "Remember? We walked outa that bank with $11,000 . . . We murdered old Ben Scull together . .. There's no guts any more." Well, almost none. Julie London interests the boys: "Start takin' off yer cloze," growls one of them, "real slow." In the nick (a knife has been held against his throat), Cooper saves Julie from a censor worse than death, and she coos gratefully: "I never met a man like you."
Wearying of stripteases, Cobb decides that he and his unsavory little band will make a comeback by heisting the local trust company, and that peace-loving Gary will ride with them. Viewers will not be surprised that Cooper outfoxes and outguns every last one of that old gang of his. As the inconvenienced cafe singer, real-life Café Singer London is as straight-from-the-bodice as Cooper is straight-from-the-shoulder.
The Barbarian and the Geisha (20th Century-Fox). One sunny day in 1953, Director John Huston was lolling around in Ravello with Writer Truman (Other Voices, Other Rooms) Capote, and having nothing better to do. they decided to make a movie. They gathered up Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones. Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, who were also lolling, and threw them all into the thing, wrote it as they went along, and turned out Beat the Devil, a masterpiece of shaggy-dog movie comedy. Director Huston should have quit while he was ahead. In filming Barbarian, he tried the same casual approach ("It looks as though we might have the story finished before the picture is." cracked Writer Charles Grayson), and ouch! —there goes 3,000,000 bucks.
Huston's story allegedly centers around one Townsend Harris, a teetotaling bachelor who in 1856 became America's first consul general in Japan after Admiral Perry's gunboats persuaded the empire to abandon its centuries of total isolation. One of the characters who entered his life was, perhaps, a laundress named Oki-chi, whom he saw twice when she came to pick up his dirty linen. In Huston's freewheeling version, Okichi is a luscious geisha, and the consul is John Wayne.
Against the protests of the provincial governor, Wayne lands at Shimoda with a diplomatic sneer on his lips for the scenery, and a kind word of thanks for his quarters: "This'll do." After a prolonged snubbing by the governor, Wayne finally gets asked to dinner—and promptly leers at the prettiest geisha, Old Laundress Okichi (Japanese Stripper Eiko Ando). She moves into his house, which solves some of his problems, but he is still annoyed at the delay in gaining accreditation. "I didn't come here to give information to the Agriculture Department." snaps Wayne, six years before the U.S. had an Agriculture Department. He anticipates the speeches of Abraham Lincoln just as surely. When he has finally gained entrance to the shogun's palace and is being questioned about U.S. traffic in slaves, he squares his shoulders and croaks: "It cannot long endure."