By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Ernest Pintoff, who helmed Harvey Middleman: Fireman, Dynamite Chicken, Who Killed Mary Whats’ername?, Jaguar Lives! and more.
Like many filmmakers, the late and now little-known Ernest Pintoff began his career in a blaze of glory – even winning an Oscar – and then never quite maintained that level of acclaim and attention throughout the rest of his creative life. It’s certainly not, however, a question of talent, as writer/director Pintoff helmed a pioneering collection of animated shorts; an interesting, impressive, highly individualistic set of feature films; and much episodic television. As this column has frequently demonstrated, that is unfortunately the perfect combination to guarantee Unsung Auteur status.
Ernest Pintoff was born in 1931 in Watertown, Connecticut, and raised in New York City. Musically inclined, Pintoff originally began his creative life as a jazz trumpeter, and also taught painting and design at Michigan State University. Pintoff also harboured filmmaking ambitions, with a particular interest in animation, and first worked in the world of TV commercials. While animating highly entertaining spots for beer, Burry’s Scooter Pie, Lucky Strike smokes and other products, Pintoff made his film debut in 1957 with the pithy, bitingly funny six-minute short Flebus, which he co-directed with Gene Deitch. Adult-oriented animation was far less prevalent in the 1950s as it is now, so Pintoff rates as something of a pioneer in the burgeoning field.
Pintoff once again employed the dark humour and simple line-drawing style that he’d used on Flebus for his 1959 eight-minute animation The Violinist, in which comic great Carl Reiner voices a grumpy musician forced to rethink his playing style. The film earned Pintoff an Oscar nomination, and the burgeoning director created a trio of similarly styled cartoons (1960’s The Interview, 1961’s The Shoes, 1962’s The Old Man And The Flower) before really hitting creative paydirt with 1963’s The Critic. The four-minute short was devised in tandem with comic legend Mel Brooks, who hilariously provides embittered improvised commentary over a series of experimental on-screen images. A canny send-up of pretentious art cinema, The Critic picked up the gong for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards.
With his continuing success in short film, Pintoff made his feature debut in 1965 with the comedy Harvey Middleman, Fireman. Though the film’s poster features the kind of cartoon drawings that Pintoff had used in his shorts, the director’s debut was very much a live action project, but with the strange, pithy, absurdist brand of humour that he’d employed in his animations still in full effect. “Live action made me verbal,” Pintoff said in the January 1974 issue of Filmakers Newsletter. “In animation, you just communicate with guys sitting around drawing boards. I put all of my ideas into the soundtrack and became known for that. In live action, you have to be able to communicate with many people on a set…you’ve got to be articulate!”
Decidedly wacky, Harvey Middleman, Fireman stars Eugene Troobnick as the eponymous lead character, a seemingly happily married man who embarks on a hopeful fling with a beautiful woman he rescues from a building fire. Though slight, the film marks an interesting debut for Pintoff, who then directed the TV pilot The Kowboys (a singing cowboy group concept from the creators of The Monkees) before embarking on his next big screen effort.
Predating sketch comedy films like 1977’s The Kentucky Fried Movie and TV shows like Saturday Night Live, Pintoff’s excellently titled 1971 cinematic patchwork Dynamite Chicken provided an early showcase for comic genius Richard Pryor, who anchors this wild collection of musical and comedy performances united by their saucy, frequently countercultural bent. Confrontational, edgy and very, very loose – and with appearances from legends like John Lennon, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol – Dynamite Chicken is an entertainingly lurid time capsule…which would certainly upset large segments of the audience today.
After the wild, freewheeling, up-yours swagger of Dynamite Chicken, Pintoff maintained his against-the-grain stance but really honed his filmmaking skills with his next effort. Though now completely forgotten, 1971’s Who Killed Mary Whats’ername? stands as Pintoff’s most complete and consistently interesting film. Written by TV commentator John O’Toole, this gritty, highly original urban drama is set on the margins and comes packed with flawed, desperate, but quietly admirable characters that really get their claws into you.
In a piece of casting that really shouldn’t work but ultimately succeeds in a major way, classic Hollywood actor Red Buttons beautifully essays the character of Mickey Isador, a proud but broken-down ex-boxer struggling to get by in a tough, low-rent urban neighbourhood. When a local prostitute is murdered and the police barely raise an eyebrow, Mickey becomes an unlikely white knight and investigates the crime himself out of both sadness and a burning sense of injustice. Stylistically out-there but bristling with a real sense of humanity, Who Killed Mary Whats’ername? is far, far, far better than its largely non-existent reputation would suggest.
Pintoff stayed on the streets for the tough, grimy 1973 cop thriller Blade starring John Marley, and then moved into episodic television, helming installments of classic shows like Kojak, Police Woman, Hawaii Five-0, Barnaby Jones, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Pintoff returned to the big screen intermittently between TV directing jobs, though his work became a little erratic with the likes of 1981’s Jaguar Lives! (an unsuccessful attempt to turn martial artist Joe Lewis into an action superstar as secret agent Jonathan “Jaguar” Cross), St. Helens (which takes a “disaster movie” approach to the famed volcano eruption and stars Art Carney) and Lunch Wagon (a cheap, silly comedy that harks back a little to Pintoff’s early work).
After sadly suffering a stroke in 1985, Ernest Pintoff retired from film and television and turned to writing. He penned a memoir, Bolt From The Blue and a 1990 novel, Zachary, which melds the coming-of-age and crime genres, as well as various titles on animation and filmmaking. Pintoff’s health continued to decline, and this idiosyncratic and sadly under-celebrated filmmaker passed away from a stroke on January 12, 2002. A quiet pioneer in the fields of animation and humour, and a director never afraid to walk on the wild side, Ernest Pintoff is deserving of a much, much higher profile than he is currently afforded.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Paul Williams, Jo Heims, Lee H. Katzin, Christoper Cain, Ken Wiederhorn, Barbara Loden, David Mackenzie, Alan Rudolph, James Lee Barrett, Edwin “Bud” Shrake, Joan Tewkesbury, Jamaa Fanaka, Jack Starrett, Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
