Mean Johnny Barrows

I found this flick on a three movie DVD compilation of Fred Williamson films for around three or four bucks. I discovered it at the supermarket of all places and what a return on that initial four dollar investment (If you strung together the randomly occurring "good bits" from all three shows you'd have one cool, effectively kick-ass movie-- it wouldn't make any sense of course but it'd be chock full of good bits!).

I love Fred Williamson-- he's like the funky love-child of John Cassavetes and Jim Brown. There may be rambling and fumbled story lines and plot focus, the quality of the production may waver and shift with the tenuous availability of funds, always some friends-doing-a-favor-casting, bizarre and clunky setups, obtuse angles and ham-fisted camera work, self-indulgent faux-introspective montage, and lots of technical sloppiness and cheap shortcuts are all evident throughout his oeuvre. But the fervent passion and pure love for cinema all seem to somehow leak through like tepid, runny kindergarten paste holding everything together by some incredulous force of will. Fred's shrewd and clever will.

Fred may not be easily filed in the same category with directors of such influence and artistic gravitas as Lang, Welles, or Kurosawa, but they probably wouldn't mind hanging out with him over a couple of drinks and some girls.

Mean Johnny Barrows is not a good movie. But it is fun, goofy, dumb, sleazy, cheap, silly and thrilling. For the right pair of eyes that delight in the subtle contextual appreciations of Blaxploitation, Crime/Mob Pictures, or just choice 1970's trashy film-making it is an inimitable masterpiece.

The casting is priceless. Luther Adler is perfect as a post-Godfather era cardboard cut-out patriarch with the additional ludicrous premise of having Roddy McDowall play his own son. McDowall's hairstyle alone is enough to justify purchasing this movie, with the appearance of a melting dollop of brown Cool Whip. He frets and blanches and swallows as a Fredoesque nervous Nellie, uncomfortable with his familial role as oldest son and next-in-line Family Boss.

The astounding Stuart Whitman plays a rival Mob Boss who owns an Italian Restaurant and spends most of the time interfering in the kitchen. His hair also invokes an instinctual fight-or-flight response like Mary-Tyler Moore at an Alice Cooper concert. He has a strange tendency to instantaneously change entire outfits without warning in a singular scene. He also keeps one arm stiffly bent at chest level at all times for no discernible reason whatsoever and in most scenes appears to have been sleeping in his wardrobe, woken up only seconds before filming any of his takes.

R.G. Armstong is undeniably electrifying as the filling station owner who reluctantly gives the jobless and homeless Mean Johnny Barrows employment for no other reason than he needs someone to clean his bathrooms.

And Elliot Gould makes his legendary "Special Appearance" as the worlds most colorful and erudite hobo in motion picture history.

There's lots of music and walking sequences, bad suits, nasty cops, bigotry, ambition, and eating out of garbage cans. There's romance and violence and lots of giant 70's cars pulling in and out of driveways, all inevitably leading up to fisticuffs and gratuitous gun play, of course.

I would say if you have four bucks in change floating around inside your couch or car or even in the pockets of an old coat in storage somewhere and you have developed an appreciation for this enjoyable genre, trade in those rolls of pennies and pick it up! 'Cause at the end of the day, it's all about Fred.

Mean Johnny Barrows is one mean a dull of a film.

Basically it tells the story of Johnny Barrows, a former soldier who gets booted out of the army for striking an officer.

As he returns to his hometown, he gets mugged and robbed and therefore, he is left penniless.

Determined to start his life up again, he goes around looking for a job. There, he works at a garage and meets up with this chick called Nancy.

However, prior to his job, he gets recruited by Mario Racconi when he gets gunned down by the Da Vinci family following a truce that went wrong.

Determined to take on the job, Johnny goes round bumping off each member of the Da Vinci family until he reaches a climatic end putting a full scale on them with a double-barrelled shot gun.

Well afterwards, what happens..? Someone puts a contract out on him. But who..?

Well, it comes to show with a classic film like this, there are some good moments as well as bad. A good cast though, even Fred Williamson directed this flick.

Not bad, but after all it is one mean of a dull film!

I just want to say that this is a lot better than the last film I watched with Fred Williamson (Adios Amigo). But Mean Johnny Barrows is a crime film that has an interesting story, but is poorly executed across the big screen due to lousy direction from star Fred Williamson. In this snoozefest he is kicked out of the army for striking an officer. He then has a streak of bad luck starting with a beat down by the police. Then our hero is a hobo, homeless in extreme poverty. He then moves on up by scrubbing toilets in a gas station before taking a job as mob hitman. What else happens is hazy in memory due to struggling to stay awake in this poorly put together snoozefest. As a Fred Williamson fan, Mean Johnny Barrows is a let down and a bummer. Even though some of his films are of shoddy quality, Fred Williamson is a really cool and bad ass dude. His finer qualities don't save this stinker and I would advise interested parties to skip this one.

A dishonorably discharged Vietnam vet soon finds himself homeless and unemployed on the streets of Los Angeles. He gets a job offer from a mobster to wipe out another mob family. Not a thought-provoking premise, but one that could have delivered some action and excitement. But the movie is anything but action-packed and exciting. Our hero doesn't take the mob boss' job offer until more than an hour of the running time has passed! And when he does start delivering business, it's not very compelling - it's as if director Williamson was determined to make all this "action" as slow and boring as the first hour of the movie. The movie looks okay for what was a poverty-row budget, and Williamson in front of the camera has some charisma, but that's nowhere enough to save the movie. And why does the title card of the movie claim the hero is named "Johnny Barrows" when a badge the hero wears in the beginning of the movie states he's named "Johnnie Barrows"?

I wish someone would put Fred's directorial debut out in a decent widescreen DVD. The pan and scan versions out there now are so tightly cropped that they add a quality of hilarity even when the film is actually hitting some pretty serious notes (the pan and scan job is so bad it is almost like some kind of Austin Powers gag). But that said, I'm sure that much of the film would still be hilariously inept in any aspect ratio. In fact, the climax features THE most unintentionally comical Kung Fu fight ever put to film. I mean how often have you seen an actor start a butt-kicking by suddenly making snake moves with his hands and going "ASsssssssssshhhhhhhhsh sh sh sh"?

But there are some very effective moments as well, especially a brief cameo from Elliot Gould, who must have hit upon VERY hard times in the five years between MASH and this. And the sequence in which Johhny lets loose his anger by blasting and summarily cremating a mob boss almost seems like it's from another, much better, movie.

Anyway, it's a crazy hodgepodge, but I'd still like to see it in the original widescreen. Fred rules!