Music On Film is a column from The Dissolve recommending movies fans of music should make a point of checking out.
With his trademark combination of honey dripping charm and ex-military belligerence, Rip Torn was born to play a cynical country singer. He doesn’t have much of a singing voice, but he does have the requisite roughneck charisma and magnetism to put meat-and-potatoes country fodder across in the brilliant 1972 character study Payday.
The film casts Torn as Maury Dann, a hillbilly singer who is all smiles and fake congeniality onstage or when talking to his adoring public and a borderline sociopath in his private dealings. Behind that big, selectively flashed grin lies a core of sneering calculation. Dann presents himself as a man of the people, that default country pose, but Daryl Duke’s cult masterpiece depicts him as a man who sees the world as a series of endless transactions to be rigged in his favor.
Whether he’s seducing the groupie of one of his sidemen after he’s fired him—in the backseat of a car with his own regular girlfriend passed out less than a foot away—or transforming a "friendly" visit to a small radio station DJ into a passive-aggressive war of wills, Dann sees everything through the prism of his own insatiable appetites and rapacious ego.
Payday removes the cornball glamour of country and replaces it with outlaw grit. The film stock all but sweats in the heat of the honky-tonks, wood-paneled hotel rooms and all-night hootenannies that make up the film’s slice-of-life action. Director Daryl Duke and screenwriter Don Carpenter favor a brutal naturalism as their charismatic anti-hero destroys one relationship after another in his relentless pursuit of money, women, success and power.
The film has the simultaneously wired and exhausted tone of a party that has gone on far too long and ceases to be fun for anyone involved. Dann is ostensibly making the rounds en route to a performance on a Johnny Cash special that could do wonders for his career but he unwittingly seems to be pursuing his own end game, pushing his greediness and reckless self-interest as far as it will take him, and then a little further, past the point of no return. The songs Dann croons traffic in the honeyed lies and disingenuous odes to simple folk of generic country past and present but Payday gets its enduring power from its unrelenting pursuit of sweaty, unvarnished and uncomfortable truth.