La Zona Muerta

We’ve looked for evidence for years, and the ribald, violent nature of the movie should put paid to the notion, but the missus and I have always felt that Joe Don Baker’s disheveled and sweaty Mitchell (1975) really, really, REALLY feels like it’s a pilot for a TV show. We get patterns of behavior, call backs, broad caricature supporting cast members and a swell little set-up that would seem to suggest ongoing adventures. I think it only came to light semi-recently that Mitchell screenwriter Ian Kennedy Martin did indeed write an episode of a crime anthology series for the BBC in 1971 entitled “Detective Waiting” that did have a very proto-Mitchellian character and some situations that Kennedy Martin recycled wholesale for the later work (never throw away those ideas, kids), but that wasn’t meant to be an ongoing thing, either… perhaps that was just a hallmark of how Kennedy Martin worked. Not an ongoing thing, but felt like it could be… a seemingly unlikable cop (albeit with a certain amount of aw, shucks charm) and a core of incorruptibility (except when it came to matters of the bedroom heart).

The first time we saw the unedited movie, we were a bit taken aback. Not by the minor language changes but more because of the way John Saxon’s character is killed. In the Mystery Science Theater version, very much edited for TV, Saxon essentially disappears. In the unedited film, Mitchell and Saxon’s character Walter Delaney have a dune buggy battle (!) and then a wild eyed Mitchell caves in the brains of one of Delaney’s henchmen with a rock (which you can see a bit of in the opening credits). John Saxon’s character flips his dune buggy, crashes and dies a Speed Racer death, as one does.

Like, if we didn’t love the movie before…

The movie itself is a little… there’s an awful lot of exposition and several confusing names that we are sort of just expected to absorb and know. The plotting and counter plotting of the bad guys is a tad convoluted and the romance, such as it is, between Mitchell and Greta, a hooker with a possible heart of gold (probably not) is not exactly Tracy and Hepburn… but it’s cute enough. Just don’t ask about the bottle of baby oil. Baker does have a certain, unkempt sort of charm about him, and obviously he only plays Mitchell as a dope to keep his friends close and his enemies closer or whatever hoary cliche applies. There’s a core of a good movie here, somewhere.

Anyway, obviously this film only looms large, not due to the size of Joe Don, but due to its inclusion on the aforementioned Mystery Science Theater 3000. I won’t go into all of THAT particular drama here; suffice to say it’s a beloved episode of the series, and with good reason. I have tried here to capture the disheveled, tired quality to Baker om this picture… hopefully I did him (final) justice.

When I took my first pass at this, the opinionated Mrs Convoy chided me, saying Mitchell wasn’t disheveled enough, particularly in the hair dep’t. I took another pass and changed my approach on the hair which met with her standards