The above is the name of Dennis Hopper's character in Cool Hand Luke, but I believe it is Choctaw for "idjit with ants in his prison pants."
Seriously, what gives with this? Saw this picker-upper of a flick for the first time in five+ years just the other week, and the intervening half-decade must have been busier/harsher than I can remember to have scrubbed this performance off my brainpan.
All sorts of "types" locked up in a southern prison farm - Ralph "Pa Walton" Waite as the nice guy who accidentally killed someone in a car crash, Wayne Rogers as the requisite prisoner who wears glasses, Harry Dean Stanton as himself, etc - and here comes Dennis Hopper, generally simpering and being plain obtrusive - literally sticking his mugging head into frame and/or hopping side to side, all the while making cooing sounds and generally acting like a nine-year old who had some zweiback dipped in old-skool psychedelics.
Since this movie came out in 1967, it was likely filmed in '66; so maybe Dennis had been hanging out with Larry Rivers and Roger Vadim and suddenly George Harrison's dentist ran in and hipped him to the 'cid. BUT that is no excuse for trippedly thinking that maybe you need to be so damned obtrusive (that word again!) in your show-offy antics. Is one to infer a back-story of a simple idiot piney-woods child who stole one too many Studebakers and has to now Pay Society? The gurning rictus and spastic gyrations negate compassion.
Still, DH was also Frank Booth, so, like, all is forgiven. Sort of.
Seriously, what gives with this? Saw this picker-upper of a flick for the first time in five+ years just the other week, and the intervening half-decade must have been busier/harsher than I can remember to have scrubbed this performance off my brainpan.
All sorts of "types" locked up in a southern prison farm - Ralph "Pa Walton" Waite as the nice guy who accidentally killed someone in a car crash, Wayne Rogers as the requisite prisoner who wears glasses, Harry Dean Stanton as himself, etc - and here comes Dennis Hopper, generally simpering and being plain obtrusive - literally sticking his mugging head into frame and/or hopping side to side, all the while making cooing sounds and generally acting like a nine-year old who had some zweiback dipped in old-skool psychedelics.
Since this movie came out in 1967, it was likely filmed in '66; so maybe Dennis had been hanging out with Larry Rivers and Roger Vadim and suddenly George Harrison's dentist ran in and hipped him to the 'cid. BUT that is no excuse for trippedly thinking that maybe you need to be so damned obtrusive (that word again!) in your show-offy antics. Is one to infer a back-story of a simple idiot piney-woods child who stole one too many Studebakers and has to now Pay Society? The gurning rictus and spastic gyrations negate compassion.
Still, DH was also Frank Booth, so, like, all is forgiven. Sort of.
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