Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #227 The Traveling Executioner (1970)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen. 

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well. 

In a world without COVID 19 or The Delta Variant, I would currently be deep into the third and final day of the Gathering of the Juggalos, getting myself drugged up for Insane Clown Posse’s climactic closing performance. 

But I am not in the Juggalo Paradise of Thornville, Ohio, celebrating life alongside my fellow Juggalos. This year I chose to stay home, avoid the pandemic, spend time with my family and work. 

So instead of journeying to the Gothic Midwest I instead took a trip back in time to the heady days of New Hollywood courtesy of Jack Smight’s masterfully morbid 1970 character study The Traveling Executioner. 

For me, New Hollywood isn’t just my favorite era of film. It’s more than that. It’s a feeling. It’s a spirit. It’s a way of looking at the world that combines deep empathy and curiosity. New Hollywood is, and will always be, one of my Happy Places. 

So if I can’t be at one of my other Happy Places, the Gathering of the Juggalos, then I can at least surround myself with something I adore with my whole body and soul: the outlaw Hollywood of 1967 through 1980. 

As its title betrays, The Traveling Executioner is a quintessential New Hollywood downer that casts an absolutely magnificent Stacy Keach, in one of his first and finest film roles, as larger than life anti-hero Jonas Candide. 

Candide was once a carny and a convict but he’s traded in his old hustles for something more lucrative and lethal: he travels from town to town with his trusty electric chair and performs executions for the state for one hundred dollars a head. 

With his long black hair, top coat and eccentric facial hair, Jonas looks like he should be shooting heroin with the Rolling Stones and Gram Parsons during the recording of Exile on Main Street. 

Instead the debonair personification of capital punishment is incongruously a rock star of state executions, a charismatic dandy who struts into town like visiting royalty, wows prisoners, wardens and the condemned alike with his cathartic, theatrical approach to lethal electrocution, collects his fee and pays a pricey trip to the local brothel. He then starts the process all over again in the next town. 

In a performance of brawling charisma and brawny virility, Keach plays Jonas as a consummate artist as well as a con man and inveterate swindler. He’s a man with larceny in his soul, an inveterate ne’er do well with a killer gig in more ways than one. 

Jonas doesn’t just kill people the state wants dead: he puts on a goddamn show for all involved, a spectacle that climaxes deliriously with a monologue about the the paradise awaiting the doomed on the other side. 

The way Jonas describes the fields of Ambrosia allow us, as well as the soon-to-be-dead prisoners he’s seducing with his honeyed words, to not just see this faraway heaven but to feel it and smell it as well. 

Through the magic of Keach’s extraordinary performance we’re able to experience a little taste of ultimate bliss along with the condemned, and it’s so goddamn intoxicating that it almost masks the brutality of Jonas’ occupation. He’s so convincing and persuasive that men sentenced to fry in an electric chair for evil deeds find themselves convinced they’re mere moments away from meeting God and baby Jesus and a choir of angels.

Jonas provides clean, efficient executions, most of the time, at least. As a bonus he provides peace of mind and a reason for hope to men who need it more than anyone in the world.

The movie opens with Jonas agreeing to execute a pair of German immigrants convicted of murder for a warden played by the great M. Emmet Walsh. Even a half-century ago the Blood Simple character actor had the vibe of a sad, weird old man with a soft southern drawl as slow as molasses cut with vinegar and arsenic. 

The handsome lady’s man with a weakness for prostitutes takes an immediate liking to the beautiful, condemned woman he scheduled to kill. He’s intent on seducing her and sees no conflict of interest in wanting to be both her final lover and the man who sends her to the great unknown. 

But Jonas has room enough in his shriveled black heart for more than just one money-making hustle. So he decides to combine business with pleasure and rent the town’s working girls from their madam for a fee so that he can sell their sexual services to prison inmates DESPERATELY in need of female companionship. 

Like a true product of New Hollywood, the plot here doesn’t particularly matter here. This is not a movie about plot or action but rather character and milieu, though I was struck that the film’s premise is a cross between “The Man Who Was Death”, the badass, Walter Hill-written and directed premiere of Tales From the Crypt and recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry and massive flop Let’s Go to Prison. 

Like “The Man Who Was Death”, this is a grim character study of a man for whom being an executioner isn’t just a job: it’s an existential calling, a sacred duty, Also like the classic terror tale it’s about a man who ends up dying the way he lived. 

Like Let’s Go to Prison this is a pitch-black comedy whose third act involves a character faking an execution so that they can be reunited with a loved one outside of prison bars. I didn’t really discuss that aspect of Let’s Go to Prison because there was so much else to deride but that premise plays out in a much less tidy and infinitely more satisfying manner here.

A Fulbright Scholar and graduate of the Yale Drama School, Stacy Keach had everything it took to be one of the all-time greats with the exception of a breakthrough film role that would catapult him high atop the A-list alongside peers like Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Jeff Bridges and Al Pacino.

The Traveling Executioner is not a perfect movie but it is a perfect vehicle for its star. Keach makes the film’s unforgettable title character a man who lives large in the twilight between life and death before ultimately suffering a terribly ironic, terribly predictable fate. 

I leaped at the chance to write up this movie because its premise sounded morbidly appealing but mostly because I am a huge Stacy Keach fan and this is one of his best roles and best performances. 

I’m not the only one impressed by this purposefully depressing comedy-drama. John Huston was so impressed by Keach’s performance here that he cast him in the lead in 1972’s Fat City and in a supporting role in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Though largely forgotten, The Traveling Executioner also inspired a stage musical, The Fields of Ambrosia.

So if you too are hankering for a trip back to the blissful days of New Hollywood and have worn out all the classics check out this nifty little sleeper about a bad man and consummate schemer you can’t help but love in spite of himself.  

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