MAN WITHOUT PITY

Steve Sandor draws first blood before Rambo arrives on the scene.


Above you see a low rent poster for The No Mercy Man, aka Bad Man, aka Trained to Kill: USA, which premiered this month in 1973 starring Steve Sandor and Rockne Tarkington, the latter last seen chilling with his pet lion in Black Samson. The No Mercy Man is a mash-up of a biker film, a High Noon-style western, and a blaxploitation film, done on the cheap. And of course with low budgets usually come bad acting, weak scripting, all thumbs in the technical departments, and a paucity of promo images (we found two). This film also has, as a special bonus, a deeply earnest theme song that sucks terribly:

And when he loves you, he loves as hard as he can.
You get no mercy, naw naw naw, from the no mercy man.
Love and lust are the same to him,
just like being raped by the Devil.
His kind of love can only bring you sin,
and his arms can only bring you evil… whooooa ohhh ohhh…

The “no mercy man” of the lyrics is the protagonist Olie Hand, played by Sandor, which means being raped by the Devil is about the hero. Incredibly, the closing theme is even worse, with the lyrics, “no one understands you ’cause you can’t be understood.”
 
Well, let’s give it a try. Olie Hand is a Vietnam veteran who did terrible things in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and has now returned to his Arizona hometown to find it plagued by amoral carnies and petty criminals. He’s haunted by the war. The sight of violence sends him into a mental tailspin, as horrible memories of his time in action rise to the surface. Despite his aversion to violence, it isn’t long before he’s forced to take on the men who are turning his town upside down.

Hand is legitimately psychologically damaged, which makes him a clear precursor to Sylvester Stallone’s disturbed John Rambo from First Blood. After that film became a runaway hit Stallone booted the mental imbalance of the Rambo character out of the franchise, which freed cinemagoers to revel in hyperviolence without reflection. Rambo became the type of archetypal tough guy many Americans imagine themselves to be—the basically solid guy who tries very hard to avoid trouble, but once he’s pushed across the line, boy howdy, you better open wide for your just desserts. Ollie Hand’s relationship to John Rambo is clear, but he also brings to mind another iconic movie vigilante.

The year after The No Mercy Man appeared Charles Bronson brought everyman architect Paul Kersey to the screen in Death Wish. Kersey wasn’t tortured by previous violent acts; he was justified by current events to commit violence. Killing wasn’t harmful but healing, and tookplace vigilante style because of the limits of the law. It was done reluctantly, but creatively, because the capacity for baroque forms of murder lurked beneath the surface all along. American action movies have largely resided in that space ever since: violence is a rarely used but well-oiled tool every real man has at the ready, tucked between his pliers and his socket wrench.

The No Mercy Man is exploitative schlock, but it’s at least a bit more thoughtful than the average revenge flick. It suggests there’s a price paid for violence beyond mere regret, or being turned into a taciturn curmudgeon whose warm side can eventually be teased out by the right woman or a precocious kid. The price is that you may be so altered that others are unable recognize you as human. If you’ve actually read your U.S. history—we mean the stuff they only gloss over in school—you know that violence has always been a first resort. The No Mercy Man acknowledges that this isn’t ideal, but of course in the end decides pacifism is for pussies. It is, after all, still an American movie.
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1937—Hitler Reveals His Plans for Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.

1991—Fred MacMurray Dies

American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.

1955—Cy Young Dies

American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.

1970—Feral Child Found in Los Angeles

A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.

1957—Soviets Launch Dog into Space

The Soviet Union launches the first ever living creature into the cosmos when it blasts a stray dog named Laika into orbit aboard the capsule Sputnik II. Laika is fitted with various monitoring devices that provide information about the effects of launch and weightlessness on a living creature. Urban myth has it that Laika starved to death after a few days in space, but she actually died of heat stress just a few hours into the journey.

1989—Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Folds

William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which had gained notoriety for its crime and scandal focus, including coverage of the Black Dahlia murder and Charles Manson trials, goes out of business after eighty-six years. Its departure leaves the Los Angeles Times as the sole city-wide daily newspaper in L.A.

Uncredited cover art for Lesbian Gym by Peggy Swenson, who was in reality Richard Geis.
T’as triché marquise by George Maxwell, published in 1953 with art by Jacques Thibésart, also known as Nik.

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