Written by Gary Deane
“He calls himself, Johnny Cool… Everybody remembers him, but nobody knows him.”
In Dark
City, there’s a Johnny on every corner—Johnny Allegro
(1949), Johnny Angel (1945), Johnny Apollo (1940), Johnny Eager (1942), Johnny Guitar (1954), Johnny Gunman (1957), Johnny Nobody (1961), Johnny O'Clock (1947), Johnny One-Eye (1950), Johnny Rocco (1958), Johnny Staccato (1959-1960), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949), Johnny on the Run (1953), Johnny on the Spot (1954), Johnny, You’re Wanted (1956). Some you
want to know, some maybe you don’t. Johnny
Gunman is a morose, dull-eyed loser and Johnny
One-Eye turns out to be somebody’s pet pooch.
Johnny Cool (1963), on the other hand, is one you’d do well to look out for—a
stylish and chilling post-noir that comes at the screen like a fist. In the film’s
tragic opening sequence, a young Salvatore Giordano watches his mother murdered
by a gang of Italian fascists. In a rage, the boy manages to pull the pin on a grenade
hanging from one of the soldier’s belts, then flee. He picks a rifle up and
cries, “The gun is now the only family I have!” as a partisan sniper kills the
others.
Fast forward
a few years. Mob boss Johnny Colini aka ‘Johnny Cool’ summons Salvatore (played
by Henry Silva), now a hardened fighter. Colini (Marc Lawrence, in a bravura
performance) is an aging Italian-American mobster now living in exile in Italy.
He tells Salvatore that he wants him to extract vengeance on those responsible
for his deportation: “You’ll do a job for me no other man could do. I want you
to go to the men who betrayed me, take back what they stole, and make them
dead.” Once Colini’s accounts have been settled, Salvatore becomes the new Johnny
Cool and takes over the mafia kingpin’s criminal empire in the United States.
Salvatore had only ever battled for freedom and justice up to that point. He must, however, follow tradition and he boards a plane for New York. After taking a few days to get adjusted, Salvatore—now ‘Johnny’—heads to a local bar for a quiet drink but ends using his combat skills to take down a quarrelsome drunk. This attracts the attention of a beautiful-but-bored socialite, Darien Guinness (‘Dare’ to her pals), who seems to find males beating the snot out of each other arousing. Dare (a lascivious Elizabeth Montgomery) is recently-divorced and thinks Johnny looks like he might be just what she’s looking for. She says to him, “All men look like men but so few really are.” She asks, “What do you do?” Johnny replies, “I do my best.” and they leave together.
By this point, the syndicate has figured out who Johnny is and decides to send him a message. A couple of its soldiers are sent to ‘rough up’ Dare (a euphemism for sexual assault). When Johnny finds out, he swears, “The men who did this to you are now dead.” and takes his vengeance up-close-and-personal. He now has to move quickly to eliminate the mob bosses scattered across the U.S. and takes Dare with him. The gangsters–̶ played vigorously by Telly Savalas, Jim Bachus, John McGiver, Brad Dexter, and Mort Saul—are soon out of the picture. Johnny returns to New York while Dare, having had enough of the mayhem, goes to ground in Los Angeles, abandoning Johnny to whatever fate has in store for him.
Based on a novel, The Kingdom of Johnny Cool by John McPartland, and adapted by screenwriter Joe Landon (The Explosive Generation (1961), The Hoodlum Priest, (1960), Von Ryan’s Express (1965), Johnny Cool gave Henry Silva his first leading role. The intense, onyx-eyed actor, raised in Brooklyn by his Spanish mother, first came to Hollywood’s attention in 1955, after he’d starred alongside classmates Ben Gazarra, Shelley Winters, Harry Guardino, and Anthony Franciosa in an Actor’s Studio production of A Hatful of Rain. In 1957, he’d reprise his role as a cold-blooded dope dealer in the feature film version, directed by Fred Zinnemann.
Silva later was contacted by Frank Sinatra, who, liking everything he’d seen of him, asked the actor to be in Ocean’s 11 (1960), a jokey, vanity-fueled heist flick. (Silva would reunite with Sinatra in Sergeants 3 (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and again in Contract on Cherry Street (1977). As a result of his friendship with the ‘Chairman of the Board’, Silva had become a de facto member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, which led to the offer to star in the role in Johnny Cool. Produced by Peter Lawford, the film also featured fellow Rat Packers Joey Bishop as a rambunctious used-car salesman and Sammy Davis Jr. as a hanger-on dubbed ‘Educated’ due to his skills at craps (Davis also performs a couple of songs, including the title number).
Unfortunately, neither The Manchurian Candidate nor Johnny Cool led to bigger things in Hollywood for Silva. In the mid ‘60’s the under-utilized actor moved to Europe where he soon established himself as a box-office favorite, headlining in a string of popular crime thrillers and poliziotteschi, movies which he elevated beyond their generic limitations. At the same time, he continued to take whatever roles he could get in the States, keeping the doors open for a full-time return to Hollywood a decade later. Once back, he continued to work in films and television until his final appearance in Steve Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001), a passable remake of the ‘60’s classic.
Silva would come to the screen fully formed as the epitome of cool. Equal parts dead certainty and dead calm, he was always the kind of bad guy we want to survive even if we’re pretty sure he won’t. But Johnny’s no ordinary villain. Driven by moral both conviction and ancient codes of courage, he’s less an anti-hero than a tragic figure. To Johnny, Colini’s long-term economic interests and power grabs are unimportant; all that matters is the dutiful resolution of grievances no matter what the costs. Fearing for her safety, amid the violence that swirls around him, Johnny pushes Dare away. She says to him, “You can’t leave me. I’m nothing without you”. He responds, “We’re both nothing.”
Whether asked to be, or by choice, Elizabeth Montgomery (daughter of actor Robert Montgomery) is as libidinous in Johnny Cool as she would ever be on screen. While the rest of Dare’s character and motivations remain underdeveloped, Montgomery’s both there and accounted as an unsuspected femme fatale and a sensual woman aroused. When she eventually dumps Adrian, her pompous ex-husband, she calls Johnny and tells him, “I need you! I need you now!
For those who know Montgomery only as Samantha from the comedy-fantasy television series, Bewitched (1964 -1972), a lot of this may come as a shock. However, Montgomery had been attracting admirers like moths to a flame since puberty and by the time Johnny Cool was released, she was at the height of her beauty and desirability. She’d also been through two divorces, the last from actor Gig Young just before the filming of Johnny Cool. It was during that time she met the movie’s director, William Asher, and not long after its completion, she and Asher were married. Montgomery had told him she was done with acting; however, he soon came up with the idea for Bewitched and the rest is sit-com history. Following, she would become the doyenne of TV movies-of-the-week, among them A Case of Rape (1974) which chronicles the ordeal of a middle-class housewife determined to bring her assailant to trial.
Asher was best known for his lighter-hearted television work, having directed hundreds of episodes of I Love Lucy, Our Miss Brooks, The Danny Thomas Show, The Donna Reed Show, and other shows. The opportunity to direct Johnny Cool also came about as a result of his close relationship with Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford, the film’s producer, with whom he’d fly to Las Vegas for nights on the town, returning at the shoot at 5 a.m. the next morning. Asher was friend to many in Hollywood, and several feature in Johnny Cool, including Richard Anderson, Wanda Hendrix, Joseph Calleia, Elisha Cook Jr., and other built-to-last supporting players whose faces, if not names, are familiar. (Also in the mix is an uncredited Rodney Dangerfield as a testy, flap-jawed Las Vegas bus dr river.)
With Johnny Cool in the can, Asher then got to work on the first of his famous moment-in-time ‘beach party’ pictures, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Big money-makers at the box office, these well suntan-oiled productions—Beach Party (1963), Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), and four others—gave Asher the greatest pleasure of his career. “The scripts were sheer nonsense, but they were fun and positive.” The films were happy illusions, the very opposite of his dismal upbringing. Asher, in fact, had probed some that territory in several downbeat domestic crime dramas, notably The Shadow on the Window (1957), a suspenseful child-in-distress noir starring Phil Carey, Corey Allen, and John Drew Barrymore.
The director also had worked on TV’s Racket Squad (1951-52), Big Town (!952), and The Line-Up (1954). In 1956, the producers of Racket Squad went back and stitched together several of the grittier episodes and released them in theaters as Mobs, Inc.—anticipating a swell of unreconstructed mob and gangster movies later to follow, such as Baby Face Nelson (1957); The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960); Murder Inc. (1960); The King of the Roaring ‘20’s: The Story of Arnold Rothstein (1961); Mad Dog Coll (1961); and Hail, Mafia (1965).
One of the most convincing of them is Johnny Cool, which dances on the edge of ugliness, its violence barely contained by the Production Code. The movie’s sharp-edged style, fueled by composer Billy May’s high-register jazz soundtrack and cinematographer Sam Leavitt’s expansive, hard-surfaced camerawork is strikingly modern. Leavitt came to Johnny Cool with an imposing resume, having worked on classic noirs The Thief (1952), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Crime in the Streets (1956), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Cape Fear (1960). He’d also received an Oscar for Best Cinematography for The Defiant Ones (1958) and then nominations for Exodus (1960) and Advise and Consent (1962).
By his own admission, Leavitt was not the easiest person to work with and the trajectory of his career reflected the fact. He told Stuart Kaminsky in an interview for the writer’s 1974 book, Don Seigel, Director, “I don’t care who it is, the biggest director or producer, if I have something to say, I talk back to them. That’s why I don’t get many great pictures (anymore)”. If by “great pictures”, Leavitt was referring to Stanley Kramer’s plodding, sanctimonious Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), then that was his last grab at fame and fortune.
Meanwhile, to both his and William Asher's lasting credit is Johnny Cool[1], a cynical, final-gasp film noir overflowing with the pulp exigencies of life and death. As Colini warns the younger and wary Salvatore, “Now is sure, later is only maybe.” No Johnny-come-lately, Johnny Cool, in all its ferocity, is very much ‘now’.
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