By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Marvin J. Chomsky, who helmed Evel Knievel, Mackintosh And T.J., Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff and Tank.
Firstly, yes, the late Marvin J. Chomsky was related to famed linguist Noam Chomsky – they were cousins. And secondly, Marvin J. Chomsky was an Unsung Auteur in a manner very similar to so many of this column’s subjects – namely, he was a director principally of television with only a handful of fascinating feature credits on his resume, leading to a chronic case of under-celebration. Though he was the recipient of several Emmy Awards for his stellar work on some huge TV projects of the 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky’s film work for the big screen is now almost completely forgotten, which is a damn shame indeed.
Marvin J. Chomsky was born in The Bronx, New York in 1929, the son of Jewish parents who immigrated from the Russian Empire. An early entrant into the entertainment world, Chomsky began working in radio while still a high school student, and soon after, made his move into the still nascent field of television on a show aimed at teenagers. He graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in speech in 1950, and from Stanford University with a master’s degree in drama the following year. He also served in the US Army, before pursuing a career in film and television earnestly. Chomsky’s early TV gigs included work as an art director, set decorator, and producer.
After gaining this invaluable experience, Chomsky moved into the director’s chair for the first time in 1964 on the television show The Doctors And The Nurses, and then stayed there, helming episodes of popular shows like The Wild Wild West, Then Came Bronson, Star Trek, Gunsmoke, Lancer and Men At War. Chomsky spread his creative wings in 1971 when he directed his first telemovie, the taut and well-received naval thriller Assault On The Wayne, starring Leonard Nimoy, which he quickly followed up with the exemplary crime drama Mongo’s Back In Town, starring Joe Don Baker and Sally Field.
Chomsky would then move between telemovies and episodic television through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. He helmed episodes of the classic cultural zeitgeist mini-series Roots (1977), Holocaust (1978), and Inside The Third Reich (1982), and high-quality telemovies like 1976’s Victory At Entebbe (featuring, amongst others, Liz Taylor and Kirk Douglas), 1977’s Little Ladies Of The Night, 1980’s Attica, 1981’s Evita Peron (starring Faye Dunaway in the title role!), 1986’s The Deliberate Stranger (with Mark Harmon as Ted Bundy!) and 1995’s Catherine The Great (starring Catherine Zeta-Jones).
In amongst his prolific TV work, Chomsky also made five feature films, all of them profoundly interesting in their own distinct ways. Chomsky made his big screen debut in 1971 with Evel Knievel, a biopic on the life of the famed motorcycle daredevil and cultural icon starring the wildly miscast but still highly entertaining George Hamilton in the title role. Helped immeasurably by a vigorous script partially written by the great John Milius (Big Wednesday, Conan The Barbarian) filled with wonderfully self-mythologising speeches and set-pieces, Evel Knievel is incredibly enjoyable, as the bike-jumping showman (Hamilton misses Knievel’s down-home qualities but certainly captures his cocky, entrepreneurial spirit) reflects on his smalltown youth while getting it together for a big jump. Chomsky shows a real flair for American iconoclasm here, and he walked similar territory for his next film.
1975’s Live A Little, Steal A Lot (also released as Murph The Surf in some territories) is based on the true story of the daring 1964 theft of the J.P. Morgan jewel collection from New York’s American Museum Of Natural History. Though boasting many tropes of the 1970s heist film, this also gives the genre an entertaining shake courtesy of its two real-life lead characters, Jack Murphy (Don Stroud) and Allan Kuhn (Robert Conrad), two laidback, freewheeling surfers who run a sideline in robberies and heists. The relationship between the two is the real driving force of the film, while an amoral girlfriend played by Donna Mills adds plentiful spice. Like Evel Knievel before it, Live A Little, Steal A Lot takes an interesting look at American male iconoclasm.
Chomsky worked with a figure just as iconic as Evel Knievel in 1975’s Mackintosh And TJ, which featured the final film performance of western legend Roy Rogers in a role written especially for him. A gorgeously rustic and endearingly old-school drama about a broken-down but still dignified bronco-buster (Rogers) who takes a teenage boy (Clay O’Brien) under his wing, Mackintosh And TJ is a beautiful mid-1970s artefact (of-the-era cult character actors Luke Askew, Billy Green Bush, Andrew Robinson and Dennis Fimple all feature) that once again shows Chomsky to be a director in enviable touch with the dizzying possibilities of true, heartfelt, authentic Americana. Though all of Chomsky’s films are deserving of rediscovery, Mackintosh And TJ is practically screaming for it.
In 1979, Chomsky worked with an American icon of a very different kind with the deeply problematic Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, which was adapted by Polly Platt (the production designer and producer famously married to Peter Bogdanovich) from the play by the revered William Inge (Picnic, Bus Stop). This daring drama stars Anne Heywood as a repressed, virginal 1950s-era schoolteacher who is raped by a sadistic African-American janitor, with whom she then engages in a sordid S&M-style relationship, which ultimately results in her shameful exile from the small community she has long called home. To say that a film whose only African-American character is a sadistic rapist would not see the light of today is an understatement, but that said, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff is a profoundly confrontational and thought-provoking work that raises bold questions about race, gender and the ugly nature of hypocrisy.
For his final feature film, Chomsky returned to more familiar territory with another rootsy, Americana-flavoured slice of entertainment. 1984’s Tank stars James Garner (another iconic leading man for Chomsky) as the iconoclastic, rugged individualist U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major Zack Carey, who locks horns with G.D Spradlin’s horribly corrupt smalltown sheriff. After a series of heated exchanges between the two men, and the framing of Carey’s son (C. Thomas Howell) on trumped-up charges, Carey fires up his vintage Sherman tank in pursuit of justice, leading to wholesale destruction and vehicular carnage. Tank is rollicking, straight-up entertainment, with Chomsky well-and-truly in the corner of his iconoclastic, down-home hero.
Marvin J. Chomsky passed away on 28 March 2022 at the age of 92 years. While the various eulogies paid to the filmmaker made ample mention of his work on Roots and Holocaust, there was sadly scant discussion of the director’s quietly impressive cinematic output. We hope we’ve played a tiny role in part-way rectifying that…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs 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.
