By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: actor Christopher Jones, the star of Wild In The Streets, Three In The Attic, The Looking Glass War and Ryan’s Daughter.
On last year’s sad passing of the great Kris Kristofferson – the pioneering country singer/songwriter who ran a fascinating side hustle as an actor – we posited that an actor could indeed be an Unsung Auteur. Though Kristofferson never directed, his acting roles in the 1970s were so singular, so unusual, and so focused in theme that his resume almost resembled that of a visionary filmmaker. Kristofferson’s film choices in the 1970s seemed wholly curated, as if he was attempting to leave behind a body of work, and not just a selection of films. Offering up a similarly focused and thematically aligned resume is late actor Christopher Jones, who passed away in 2014 from gall bladder cancer at the age of 72, largely unknown to all except ardent cineastes and his small legion of cultists.
While actors like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson and others have come to embody the Hollywood countercultural era of the late 1960s and 1970s, Christopher Jones was also a vital spoke in this wildly spinning wheel. Unlike those actors, however, Jones is even more crystallised as a countercultural figure because his youthful vitality was never dimmed on-screen; outside of one little-seen, near-negligible cameo in the 1990s, Jones appeared in only six films, all between 1968 and 1970, and they all resound, in one way or another, with the rebellious insouciance of the time. The only real, meaningful on-screen images of Christopher Jones bristle with hip knowingness, and his charisma radiates like a hopped-up beacon promising a proverbial walk on the wild side.
Christopher Jones had everything required of a countercultural hero of the late 1960s. Born poor and at a distinct disadvantage in 1941 in Jackson, Tennessee, William Franklin Jones’ mentally ill artist mother was institutionalised when he was just a young boy, and she later died while interned. Jones then bounced between state homes, was detained for juvenile delinquency, and eventually joined the US military, but went AWOL after just two days. After serving time in military prison, Jones then moved to New York City, where he studied painting, and soon fell in with a hip crowd of artists, actors and performers who were taken by his brooding good looks and obvious physical similarities to the late, great James Dean.
Encouraged by his friends, Jones auditioned for the esteemed Actors Studio, and was accepted, which led almost instantly to roles on Broadway, including a major part in Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana, where he appeared opposite acting legend Shelley Winters. Jones was in fact so embedded within the worlds of Broadway and The Actors Studio that he ended up marrying actress Susan Strasberg, the daughter of famous acting coach and Actors Studio figurehead Lee Strasberg. Despite his impressive rise, however, Jones’ attitude toward his craft has been somewhat, well, casual. “I think of acting as only a means to an end,” Jones told The Los Angeles Times. “Acting’s just my work.”
Jones’ good looks and obvious echoes of James Dean saw him cast in his first major screen role in the short-lived, Don Siegel-produced western TV series The Legend Of Jesse James, in which he essayed the notorious outlaw. After this, Jones was cast in a very memorable role in an excellent episode of the espionage fave The Man From U.N.C.L.E, playing a teenager programmed to kill by the villainous organisation THRUSH. Jones stole the show with his James Dean-style mannerisms and surprising sense of gravitas, and quickly navigated the transition from television to the big screen, making his impressive feature film debut in the 1968 youth drama Chubasco.
Written and directed by TV stalwart W.H Miner (who had directed episodes of The Legend Of Jesse James), Chubasco is a coastal coming-of-age melodrama in which Jones lithely essays the title character, a charming rogue with no direction in life and a habit of getting into trouble with the police. After tangling with a biker gang and throwing too many punches at the intervening cops, Chubasco is given a final chance courtesy of a kindly judge: like his late father, he will toil on a tuna fishing boat, and learn about the value and restorative nature of hard work. In the background, Chubasco’s girlfriend (sweetly played by his real-life wife Susan Strasberg) frets on his return, while her hardened fisherman father (a fearsomely hulking Richard Egan) agonises over his daughter’s life choices.
In this decidedly 1950s-feeling drama, Christopher Jones epitomises the youth culture of the late sixties. The grizzled fishermen take great delight in teasing him about his long hair (it’s not even that long!), calling him a “Beatle”, and puzzling over his youthful expressions like “I’m gonna split.” As one salty old seadog charmingly asks in befuddlement, “Split what?” And yes, as quickly becomes evident, Jones feels a lot cooler and edgier than the endearingly archaic film in which he is starring. That said, Chubasco is a sweet-natured film both in tune with its characters and the world of tuna fishing, with terrific scenes of men at sea that seethe with documentary-style realism. Now almost wholly forgotten, Chubasco has much to recommend it, including Jones’ chemistry with the lovely Strasberg and the young actor’s very amusing scenes with Hollywood vet Ann Sothern, who prowls and purrs in supreme cougar mode as a blowsy seaside bar owner and madam-on-the-sly.
Jones made his first real splash, however, with Barry Shear’s 1968 head-trip Wild In The Streets, one of the most deliriously strange, sweetly disturbing, pointedly satirical, and absolutely unforgettable films released by American International Pictures, a company famed for its wild and woolly cinematic output. Christopher Jones leads this heady slice of dystopian mayhem as Max Frost, a rock star who joins with Hal Holbrook’s duplicitous politician in working to lower America’s voting age to fourteen. With the kids taking over the polling booths, superstar Max is soon sworn in as President…and one of his first actions is to have everyone over thirty rounded up, thrown into concentration camps, and force-fed LSD!
While Wild In The Streets is literally jammed with freaky wonders (Shelley Winters is at her crazed, caterwauling best as Max’s loopy mum; Larry Bishop, Diane Varsi and Richard Pryor bring it as Max’s loopy bandmembers; and the film’s eerie ending stings in just the right way), Christopher Jones holds it all together with his near-flammable screen appeal and natural charisma. He’s wholly believable as a cannily intelligent rock star, and even though he’s so blatantly redolent of James Dean, Jones is also curiously original on screen. Tellingly, Wild In The Streets pushed the youthful rebellion themes of Chubasco into far wilder and more vivid territory, guaranteeing the film a small but dedicated cult of followers.
Jones personified The Generation Gap in Wild In The Streets, and in his next film – 1968’s Three In The Attic – the young actor threw himself into an issue just as potent at the time: the battle of the sexes. The film began with a script by Stephen Yafa, which won The Writers Guild Of America award for Best Student Script in 1964. Its cache and authenticity unquestionable right from the get-go, Three In The Attic stars Jones as Paxton Quigley, a swaggering braggart hipster college student whose pursue-and-seduce approach to the female of the species lands him in trouble when three sorority sisters (Yvette Mimieux, Judy Pace, Maggie Thrett) discover that he’s bedding them all at the same time. The trio enact a bizarre scheme of revenge whereby they imprison Paxton in the attic of their sorority (!!!), and then fuck him into a state of dazed submission and repentance.
Three In The Attic is just as loopy as it sounds, with the three college girls aided in their sensuously vengeful activities by the college dean (!!!), who is played by comic TV actress Nan Martin. Along with scenes involving nude painting, “magic brownies”, and other such items of the times, Three In The Attic is a true youth-movie time capsule of its turbulent era, and to labour a new cliché, it’s probably not the kind of movie you could get away with today, considering its flippant attitude towards what is basically imprisonment and sexual assault. As with Wild In The Streets, Christopher Jones is right at the centre of the youthful counterculture here, and the two films make for an extraordinary late 1960s double feature, and an incredible one-two cinematic punch from their swaggering young star.
After Three In The Attic, Jones took off for Italy for the barely released and now wholly forgotten Brief Season. Directed by Italian Renato Castellani, this 1969 romantic drama follows Jones’ Johnny Phillips, an American stockbroker in Rome who falls in love with a Swedish translator (Pia Degermark), and offers a vibrant portrait of youth culture in Italy. Jones remained in Europe for 1970’s The Looking Glass War, an espionage thriller directed by Unsung Auteur Frank Pierson. Based on the novel by John Le Carre, the film follows Jones’ Polish defector, Leiser, who is put to work on a dangerous mission by a cabal of British spies (excellently played by Anthony Hopkins, Sir Ralph Richardson and Paul Rogers) in return for his safe passage into East Germany. Exciting but cerebral, it’s a fascinating film from start to finish, richly characterised (Le Carre’s mastery of creating compromised spies is without peer), occasionally darkly funny, often highly unusual, and ultimately bruising in its tragedy.
Jones is at his best here, playing the cocky, wisecracking but curiously soulful defector with consummate, highly engaging skill. Despite its espionage trappings, The Looking Glass War also fits perfectly into Jones’ youth-centric, countercultural oeuvre, with the swaggering, sexy 23-year-old ladies’ man defector a striking counterpoint to his older spy handlers, all of whom exhibit a caustic world weariness and jadedness, even Hopkins, who only appears to be in his thirties. Also, at its core, The Looking Glass War is essentially an allegory for war itself, where older men in safe positions of power send out much younger men – their “best and brightest” – to risk their lives for the greater good. With Jones an essential product of the youth culture of the time, this theme is powerfully and unforgettably played. Forgotten like much of Jones’ work, The Looking Glass War is especially worthy of reinvestigation today, and remains as relevant as it did upon its release.
Amidst his acting, Christopher Jones split with Susan Strasberg, and played it hard and fast on the Hollywood scene. He dallied with drugs and booze, and partied with a variety of very fashionable women, including Jim Morrison’s girlfriend Pamela Courson, the tragic Sharon Tate (Jones even lived for a time at the notorious guesthouse on 10050 Cielo Drive, where Tate was later murdered by members of The Manson Family), actress Olivia Hussey, and his Brief Season and The Looking Glass War co-star Pia Degermark, amongst others. Jones was very much an actor on the heady LA scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but that all came undone when he took a role in David Lean’s 1970 epic drama Ryan’s Daughter. Under the guidance of the legendary director of Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge On The River Kwai, this was unquestionably Jones’ biggest opportunity at major movie stardom, but it turned out to be both professionally and personally devastating for the young actor.
The role of a brooding, shell-shocked WW1 British veteran whose relationship with a married Irish woman (Sarah Miles) causes a major stir in her village was a good fit for Jones; Marlon Brando was to play the role, but had to drop out. Everything else about the film, however, was a disaster for him. Jones clashed with David Lean, and had a dislike so intense for Sarah Miles that the actress conspired with co-star and noted bad boy Robert Mitchum in a bizarre act of what they perhaps saw as assistance. The pair drugged Jones in the hope that it would make him more relaxed for his love scene with Miles. To say that it didn’t work, however, is something of an understatement. Jones’ drugging prompted both a partially near-catatonic performance and a damaging case of drug psychosis. On top of that, Jones was also nearly killed in a car accident during the shooting of the film. In a final indignity, Lean deemed Jones’ British accent and line readings unacceptable and had the actor’s dialogue dubbed in post-production by English actor Julian Holloway. The shame of this cruel directorial act, combined with his horrific experiences on the set, and the ultimately poor reviews elicited by his performance, ultimately pushed Christopher Jones out of the film industry altogether.
After a stretch of serious partying, Christopher Jones got clean, and eventually became a successful painter and sculptor. Largely forgotten by all except his small legion of cult followers, Jones stayed away from movies for decades, instead focusing on his various marriages and resultant seven children. “I was sent many scripts that I never even looked at or acknowledged,” Jones said in a 1999 interview with The Globe & Mail. “I was too busy living and having fun.” Jones even turned down the offer of famed cineaste and comeback instigator Quentin Tarantino to appear as the debauched Zed in his mammoth hit Pulp Fiction. “I didn’t return Quentin’s calls because I didn’t know who he was,” Jones told The Chicago Tribune in 2000. “And I wasn’t interested. When he did find me with the Pulp Fiction script, I had no interest in acting or in the part he was offering.”
It took Jones’ friend and Wild In The Streets co-star Larry Bishop to drag the errant actor back onto the screen for a cameo in his barely released and now forgotten 1996 mob comedy Trigger Happy (also known as Mad Dog Time), a crazed and almost unwatchable mess that The New York Times appropriately described as “a rat’s nest of hip pretensions posing as a comedy.” The wonderfully lackadaisical Jones said he took the tiny role as “just something to do.” Though snubbed, Quentin Tarantino remains a fan. “Chris Jones had excitement,” QT told E. “He was a movie star. He looked like James Dean, but Chris Jones didn’t take himself seriously like James Dean. He was a Big Comer – and with the right person handling and directing he could still be as big as anybody.”
Still, it is ironically more pleasing that Christopher Jones’ final film appearance was in a bad movie that nobody saw as opposed to playing a vile butt-rapist in the cultural phenomenon that was Pulp Fiction…that is not the career capstone that this truly singular actor deserves. Yes, Pulp Fiction is wonderful, and Jones would have been fascinating in it, but we would much rather remember Christopher Jones for the youthful charisma and counterculture swagger that he so compellingly exhibited in his finely curated run of films in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “I am happy,” Jones told The Chicago Tribune in 2000. “Everyone has regrets, but I don’t have many that I want to talk about. I did exactly as I pleased…within my world.” And what a world that was…perfectly encapsulated in his fistful of fascinating films.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs 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.
