by Brendan Foley
There’s a particular aesthetic of the cinema of the 1970s which creates the sensation that the film you are watching was not so much written, directed, edited, etc., but was instead carved wholly out of the world, a perfect fraction of time singled out and sealed off as an island of existence. When a film hits that sort of feel just right, the actual mechanics of the actual film can be a little run-of-the-mill, because the value of the movie is linked to how it transports and enfolds you in a long-gone instant. I think about movies like Slap Shot or Taxi Driver, movies that capture something ugly and real about ugly and real lives, that feature the kind of worn faces that could never come within a hundred miles of a studio film in this day and age.
One of the all-time great “cinema as time machine” pictures is Dog Day Afternoon, a sweaty and angry little movie that perfectly inhabits a specific city and a specific instant, so much so that it’s still the blueprint against which all crime stories set in New York are constructed. There’s a profane poetry to the way the various characters in that film verbally spar, and a great touch for the small moments of humanity and humor that accentuate the tension, terror, and eventual bloodshed that provide the climax for the film.
The screenwriter of that film, Frank Pierson, constructed another time machine, one which has not enjoyed the same legacy as Dog Day Afternoon. If 1978’s King of the Gypsies doesn’t hit the same heights as some of its contemporaries, it’s still a fascinating and entertaining snapshot of a culture undergoing a moment of turbulence, and you would do well to seek out the new Blu-ray from Olive Films.
The easy logline for King of the Gypsies would be that Dave (Eric Roberts, in his debut role) has been selected by his grandfather to become the new “King” of the roving gypsy clan they call family, a title and legacy that Dave has no interest in. The situation fractures Dave’s independent life and brings him into conflict with his snarling reprobate of a father (Judd Hirsch) and years of gypsy tradition.
It’s a familiar enough story-shape to build a story around, The Godfather by way of the dudes who are always laying crazy curses down on people in horror movies.
But Pierson, adapting a book by Peter Maas (although he’s adapted it so loosely that Maas’s book only gets a “suggested by” credit. Then again, Pierson’s adaptation of the events of Dog Day nearly resulted in the real-life inspiration being brutally murdered in prison [yes, really] so maybe announcing upfront how loose the influence was is a smart idea), is much less interested in the mechanics of the gypsy power-struggle than he is with digging into this strange lifestyle and the people who carry it on.
Roberts, the ostensible lead, doesn’t appear until well into the film, as the early sections maintain a novelistic feel, bouncing through time for what amounts to loosely connected vignettes detailing the kind of living that comes with being a child in a gypsy clan, examining the habits and culture of a nomadic group. So you’ve got big party scenes, marriages being brokered, you have trouble with the law and the detailing of the various scams and superstitions that the gypsies run (if you ever wondered whether or not there was a movie out there where you could see young Susan Sarandon vigorously rub an egg against another woman’s boob, well, I have good news [also, why were you wondering that? Not judging or anything, but that’s a super specific to be scouring cinema for]). It’s great stuff, and with great actors like Sarandon, Hirsch, or Sterling Goddamn Hayden as the self-proclaimed “King,” and with a whole host of excellent unknowns playing the rest of the clan (it would not surprise me to learn that they just straight-up hired gypsies to play themselves), it’s easy to lose yourself into this world as the clan struggles to stay on the move as the world begins to shutter and close in around them.
At a certain point, Roberts does show up and the plot does start to kick into gear, and that’s where the film loses a step. All the great details and performances are still there, but the story is so familiar and Dave’s characterization is so vague that his struggle never really sparks to life.
Roberts is pretty excellent, his occasional dud line reading overcome by his charisma and considerable presence. He’s also fearless about the physical demands of the role, at point apparently getting actually run over by a car. These days, he probably wouldn’t let a film crew actually run him over for the sake of a movie (though, A Talking Cat?!?! appears to have obtained his vocal performance by recording him while he was trapped in a ditch, 127 Hours style) but it’s great to see him at an age where he was young and hungry and really working to establish himself.
The problem is that Dave is such a blank space as a character, it’s never entirely clear why he is so adamant about rejecting the gypsy lifestyle, or what sort of dreams or goals the character might have instead. He makes occasional mention of being an actor or being a singer, but that never actually resonates as something he would rip his family apart over.
The same goes for Judd Hirsch as Groffo, Dave’s piece of shit father. Hirsch is one of the best character actors out there, but Groffo is such a belligerent, monotonous garbage-dump of a human being that there’s nothing interesting about watching his conflict with Dave. There’s a way to write/play this sort of character that allows them to be actually empathetic (John Cazale made a career out of it, with Paul Dano doing a great riff in many of his movies) but Hirsch never gets there. When the film boils down to a confrontation between father and son, there’s no charge, no tragic kick.
If King of the Gypsies never quite achieves escape velocity, it’s still a pretty great little treasure, and definitely deserves to be more widely known. Everyone made out pretty good, though. Eric Roberts has been in approximately 9,847,654,176 movies since, Sarandon and Hirsch are still in tons of stuff, Brooke Shields (who played Dave’s sister) inspired many a teen-boy in the 1980s to seek private time.
And Pierson kept right on building time machines. At the time of his passing in 2012, he was working as a writer and producer on Mad Men, the closest modern equivalent to the kind of cinema that the 1960s and 1970s could produce. Pierson might not have been a king, but no one could tell a New York City story in quite the same way.