By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1971 crime drama Mongo’s Back In Town starring Joe Don Baker, Sally Field, Telly Savalas and Martin Sheen.
The vintage telemovie format of the 1970s and 1980s is noted for its favouring of things like issue-of-the-week storytelling, ripped-from-the-headlines narratives, social commentary, sensationalist subject matter, low-wattage biopics, and set-ups that could possibly be spun off into ongoing weekly series. The vintage telemovie format, however, also frequently played host to themes, stories and genres with which it is far less associated, with westerns, horror tales, actioners, disaster opuses, and curious character sketches all successfully reshaped as major network Movies Of The Week.
Many little-known books were also quietly adapted into telemovies, particularly from the crime genre, which is where the gloriously seamy and oddly titled 1971 drama Mongo’s Back In Town comes in. Lifted from E. Richard Johnson’s pulpy novel of the same name by veteran TV scribe Herman Miller (who also co-penned the 1968 Clint Eastwood urban western classic Coogan’s Bluff), this winningly dour little crime drama plays more like a grungy, left-of-centre low-budget indie than a telemovie, and overflows with grimy, downbeat atmosphere courtesy of highly regarded and highly prolific telemovie director Marvin J. Chomsky, who helmed major small screen works like Holocaust and Roots during his lengthy career.
Hulking Texan Joe Don Baker – a fantastic character actor and frequent leading man brilliant at playing both menacing bad guys (1973’s Charley Varrick) and noble heroes (1973’s Walking Tall) – is the eponymous anti-hero here, a sullen heavy who returns to his old neighbourhood for reasons unknown. When the fearsome Mongo Nash steps off a creaking bus in the driving Christmas-season rain, his burly presence is instantly flagged by local cops Tolstad (Telly Savalas) and Gordon (Martin Sheen), who know that the hardened criminal’s intentions are more than likely not good, and probably involve his club-owner brother Mike Nash (Charles Cioffi), with whom he has a chequered history. The sneering, impudent Mongo Nash brushes off the probing cops’ concerns and makes himself at home by picking up a young innocent (Sally Field) in a diner and bedding down in a seedy flophouse. From there, the gears of criminality grind slowly but surely toward a denouement that will place all of the film’s major characters at odds with each other.
Brimming over with the kind of fascinatingly unlikeable characters and air of dark sexual menace that characterised the novels (and subsequent screen adaptations) of the great pulp writer Jim Thompson, Mongo’s Back In Town grips tight and mean for its lean 75-minute running time (most early 1970s telemovies had to fit within this very economic storytelling framework due to time slot and advertising demands) even though there’s a paucity of genuine action. It’s the quiet desperation and bleak interplay between the characters that really drives the film, as well as the pithy, mean-spirited, and very tough dialogue. The audience is also constantly kept guessing at to the motivations and true nature of Mongo Nash, who cuts a brutish but enigmatic figure.
This is most pungently played in the tough crook’s bizarre relationship with Sally Field’s naïve but plucky smalltown girl Vikki, who arrives in the unnamed urban neighbourhood looking for a little fun and excitement, but gets a lot more than she bargained for with Mongo Nash. The unlikely duo (Joe Don Baker looms fearsomely over the tiny Sally Field) almost form a kind of S&M-style relationship, as the young woman becomes an apparently willing slave to the neanderthal and threatening demands of the bigger, older, completely dominant man. The scene in which Mongo responds to Vikki’s decision to leave him is creepy and daring in its baseness, and is also horribly at odds with the brilliant Sally Field’s later screen image as a feisty, headstrong, independent woman.
Mongo’s Back In Town is also very well-performed, with Joe Don Baker (in pretty much his first leading role after much film and TV character work) and Sally Field (in a big departure from her previous starring roles on TV’s The Flying Nun and Gidget) both superb in the central roles. Martin Sheen offers engagingly fresh-faced enthusiasm in his fairly straightforward sidekick cop role, but Telly Savalas really soars in what almost feels like a test-run for his later iconic role as the eponymous cop on the popular TV series Kojak. Playing his hip dialogue like street poetry and juicing his unusual brand of charisma for all it’s worth, the film sparks into overdrive whenever Savalas appears, and his world-weary confidence and sense of earned righteousness anchors this impressively morally ambiguous work.
Though later re-released on VHS with titles like Running Home and Steel Wreath to cash in on the eventual fame of its central players, Mongo’s Back In Town sadly went the way of many excellent telemovies of the 1970s, disappearing into the network’s vaults, and then occasionally resurfacing for repeat screenings, but largely and somewhat tragically existing solely as a mystery credit on the long and impressive resumes of its stars.
Availability: Obscure and largely forgotten, Mongo’s Back In Town is only available online in fairly muddy and tatty form, but the blurry images and sludgy sound actually add to this intriguing and very worthwhile film’s grimy sense of ambiguity.
If you enjoyed this review, check out our other vintage telemovies The Jericho Mile and Death Car On The Freeway.
