The Black Marble (1980)

You tell 'em Philo Skinner never hurt an animal in his life! You tell 'em, okay?

While The Onion Field marked Joseph Wambaugh’s first foray into non-fiction, The Black Marble represented a major shift in his fiction. The New Centurions, The Blue Knight and The Choirboys had all leaned heavily on the author’s lived experience as an LAPD cop, tragicomic polemics exploring the unhappy lot of the policeman. The Black Marble afforded him the opportunity to ditch much of the social commentary that had made his name and have a little fun for once. The novel was a taste of things to come, not only for Wambaugh’s writing – this would be the first novel where he aimed his satirical eye at the wealthier elements of Southern California – but also for the genre as a whole. Its story of a fuck-up detective investigating a dognapping feels like a precursor to Willeford’s Hoke Moseley quartet, Elmore Leonard’s turn towards comic crime in the ‘80s, and even the bonkers Floridian satires of Carl Hiaasen.

When we first meet the alcoholic, PTSD-riddled police sergeant Valnikov (Robert Foxworth), he is cross-eyed and legless, failing to blend with a Russian Orthodox congregation and repeatedly apologising for it. He misplaces his handcuffs, retrieves them, drops them down the front of his trousers, suffers a nipping mishap, tries to fish them out, and ends up with his trousers around his ankles in the pouring rain. As introductions go, it’s certainly emphatic – this guy is a pathetic excuse for a cop. If we didn’t get the point from the opening sequence, it’s repeated by his new partner Natalie (Paula Prentiss), a careerist cop who has no time for “psycho” sergeants or the half-wit brass who appear to sanction his shenanigans.

Meanwhile, “The Terrier King” Philo Skinner (Harry Dean Stanton) has problems of his own: he’s deep in hock to a shadowy figure named Arnold, who is scary enough to have Christopher Lloyd as his collection agent; business at Skinner’s dog salon and kennels is so bad he’s having to branch out to other breeds (including an attack dog named Walter, who shall henceforth be known as Chekhov’s Doberman); and when his dead-cert wager on the Super Bowl comes to naught, this self-proclaimed animal lover decides to abduct and ransom an award-winning Schnauzer named Vicky to pay off his sizeable debt. Naturally our two sad sacks will collide, and the tension of the story lies not in who will come out on top, but who has drawn the bigger black marble to begin with.¹

The Black Marble was the second of two self-financed and self-produced films by Wambaugh with Harold Becker in the director’s chair, his confidence boosted by the reception of The Onion Field the year prior. On paper, the film had some commercial potential – less of a downer than The Onion Field, at least – but Wambaugh’s commercial success as a novelist had depended largely on his empathetic inside look at the cop life, not his wilfully bizarre comedy stylings. And make no mistake: The Black Marble is wilfully bizarre, stirring jet-black comedy, one of the grimmer protagonist backstories, a romantic sub-plot, and a crime caper into a gumbo that risks alienating an audience as much as it entertains them. For Wambaugh, it was essentially a romance – “I wanted to do a love story between two stressed-out people who just happened to be cops.” – and this does form the bulk of the story; it just happens to take place with shadows pressing in from all angles.

One of these shadows is Valnikov’s trauma. Our dipsomaniac sergeant is not the battle-hardened rookie of previous Wambaugh novels; he is instead a deeply romantic man beset by nightmares of skinned rabbits and trying to process a case involving the torture and strangulation of children, a crime initially thought to be the work of a serial killer, but ultimately revealed to be the work of the children’s parents. The crime was senseless enough to make his partner kill himself, believing that there was no heaven or hell, “just one big sewer”. Valnikov’s background and Russian Orthodox beliefs preclude suicide, at least directly, and so he engages in slow, drink-fuelled self-annihilation. Or at least he was until Natalie came along.

And this is where The Black Marble differs from Wambaugh’s previous work. He stated on a number of occasions that there were only two things that could help a cop survive on the job. One was therapy, which the departments were loath to provide. That arguably would have saved Kilvinsky and Fehler in The New Centurions, Niles and Slate in The Choirboys, or Hettinger in The Onion Field. The other was a good relationship with someone “you’ll trust when they tell you that you aren’t garbage”, which arguably did save the real Hettinger and which ultimately saves Valnikov. Love conquers all is a cliché, and one which Wambaugh subverts by reversing the traditional roles: in The Black Marble, Natalie is the one who fears being softened by Valnikov’s irrepressible romanticism; she is also the controlling element of the relationship, initiating and quashing whenever the impulse takes her. She might tell Valnikov that this isn’t “a goddamn Chekhov play”, but their relationship does share some similarities², although it has the kind of happy ending that both Chekhov and Wambaugh typically refused.

None of this would work without Robert Foxworth³ and Paula Prentiss. Foxworth is incredibly amiable as Valnikov, portraying him as a decent man and a decent cop (when he isn’t drunk) who just happens to be suffering. It could have been a cloying, overwrought performance, but Foxworth brings a level of self-deprecating charm and softness that humanises a character that could so easily have fallen into Wambaugh’s usual “tortured macho cop” mould. Prentiss came back from semi-retirement for the movie and it’s a welcome return: she makes hay with the Hawksian Natalie, spitting out dialogue that no real human being ever said (and which is ultimately a front) while plausibly falling for the ridiculous Valnikov. Even their happy ending has a spikiness to it: Natalie threatens a fiddle player (James Woods) to keep playing, even as he risks soiling himself. And I’m always up for someone threatening James Woods.

No discussion of The Black Marble can pass without mentioning the great Harry Dean Stanton. His hapless chain-smoking dognapper is a masterclass is woe-is-me sweaty self-delusion. While he has a number of excellent comic moments, including the scene he shares with the also great Anne Ramsey (“Stop spitting goopers on my property, you dirty-mouthed coyote!”)⁴, his finest moments are those where his crime and his conscience collide, most notably the scene in which he discovers that the ringer Schnauzer he left as a delaying tactic died, and he tearfully decides to cut Vicky’s ear off⁵. This is a man who genuinely cares about animals – he grew up in a group home with stray dogs as his only friends; when he abducts the ringer, he’s almost killed crossing the street, shouting, “Jesus Christ, I’m carrying a little dog here, man!” (the kind of line you can hear Stanton delivering, even when written down) – and despite his insistence that he never hurt an animal in his life, he’s constantly put in a position where hurting them seems like the only option. It’s only fitting, then, that Chekhov’s Doberman makes a reappearance and takes a hefty part of Skinner’s crotch for his trouble.⁶

Like most oddball black comedies, The Black Marble died at the box office and met with largely middling reviews⁷, although it did go on to win an Edgar for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. In the face of adversity, Wambaugh did what Wambaugh always did: he sued the distributor for $10 million, alleging the release was mishandled. But the damage was already done, and Wambaugh became utterly disillusioned with the film industry: “My advice to novelists who want to produce movies is do what Norman Mailer used to do. Visit a gym and spar with the pro fighters. They used to beat the hell out of Norman. It fulfils the desire to self-destruct. Getting in the ring with moviemakers is suicidal. They put razor blades in their gloves and acid in the drinking water. You have no chance at all.”

Instead of pursuing his battered movie career, he retreated to the typewriter, hammering out a new novel “for personal survival”. That novel was The Glitter Dome, filmed as 1984 HBO movie with James Garner in the lead (directed by his old Rockford Files colleague Stuart Margolin). Wambaugh may have provided the script, but he was out of the production game, choosing instead to concentrate on his writing and return to the kind of fiction that made him famous in the first place, including the Hollywood Station quintet of books set back in his old stomping ground of the LAPD which, for all their merits, feel like a sanitised take on the books that made him famous in the first place.

And it’s a shame, because The Black Marble is exactly the kind of movie I hoped to find when I started this Substack. It isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it is very much its own idiosyncratic thing: an odd, charming, slightly whimsical, slightly grim, reasonably low-budget feature that failed to reach its initial audience and deserves to find one now.

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Next Up: “Your senses will never be the same.”

1. The “black marble” is defined only in passing in the movie: if you haven’t already guessed, “drawing the black marble” is equivalent to drawing the short straw in life. It’s not a phrase I’m familiar with, and sounds like something Wambaugh coined himself.

2. Bet you didn’t think I was going to quote Chekhov, but here we go: “[We Russians] can never stop asking ourselves as to whether we are honest or not, whether we are acting wisely or stupidly, whether the relationship is going anywhere and so forth. I don’t know whether all this is a good or bad thing, but I do know that it holds us back; it’s not rewarding; it’s just a source of irritation.” (from “About Love”)

3. Again, it would be off-brand if I didn’t mention that Foxworth was a Columbo murderer, in “Grand Deceptions”. Alas, not one of the classics.

4. Also fun is the pre-American Ninja Michael Dudikoff as “Millie’s Houseboy”.

5. There’s a line from the book that’s haunted me ever since I read it. Skinner fails to flush the severed ear down the toilet. “It floated on the water like a dead bat.”

6. For those keeping track, that’s two dead dogs (Walter cops it) and one mutilation. None of this is particularly graphic, but I understand it might be a dealbreaker for some. Weirdly enough, the promotional campaign for the novel involved sending Wambaugh to dog shows and heavy advertisement in breed magazines, saying dogs were featured in an “upcoming major novel”. God knows what the Schnauzer fanciers made of it.

7. For those with a taste for review-related ephemera, Siskel and Ebert used The Black Marble movie as the focus for a behind-the-scenes look at their process.