Let's hit the midway

My reserve copy of Carny (1980) finally came in at the library, so after the Mazo Boys' rehearsal last night, Martin, Ereck and I sat down with a pizza and took in the flick. We weren't disappointed.

In Carny, Jodie Foster plays a teenager who, fed up with her waitressing job and rageaholic boyfriend, runs off with a carnival. She does so at the urging of Gary Busey, a jittery, 25-year-old dunking-booth clown whose partner in the dunking-booth concession is a quietly intense Robbie Robertson, of the Band. (Robertson also composed the carnival music, which has calliope and bells and sounds like, well, carnival music.)

Ereck will be the first to tell you that my deepest interests are esoteric (some might say random), and Carny is a highly unusal in that it combines two of them: carnies and Jodie Foster. The carny thing stems from my trips over the last few years to the Wisconsin State Fair, where the carnies fascinate me as much as the furniture-sized hogs and prize orchids. Two years ago Ereck and I had an unforgettable state fair experience: as we rode the Ferris wheel, the carny operating the ride was led off in handcuffs by the police. (Another carny quickly took over--could it be that they're used to this sort of thing?)

The Jodie Foster love runs much deeper, though. When I was a kid I adored her in 1970s Disney movies like Freaky Friday and Candleshoe. (I didn't catch her contemporaneous performance in Taxi Driver until I was much older.) She's an actor I like to think I grew up with, like a kid in the neighborhood, though I'm shocked just now to check imdb.com and learn she's almost nine years my elder. Regardless, her wonderfully grounded and honest performances make her one of my favorite actresses.

And Carny is a fabulous vehicle for Foster, who was 18 when it came out. My favorite moment comes as she is running a concession I confess I've never seen: Let's Pull A String, in which marks pull random strings and, they hope, win a prize. In this scene a hot-panted Jodie is sprawled across the booth, holding a log-size bunch of strings, and she does this really amazing erotic smoulder as she hustles her marks--a lesbian couple. (Prophetic, no?)

Carny also features a sword swallower, a transvestite, hostile truckers, a bump-and-grind burlesque, and an enormously obese man singing the blues. When we're not watching the love triangle between Foster, Robertson and Busey, we get to see all manner of fascinating backstage carny culture. As you might expect, carny esprit de corps is strong.