C&C 71: The Curious Case of The Comeback Trail at CrimeReads
How did this movie get made twice? And who is Harry Hurwitz?
I fell down a rabbit hole, and the fine folks at CrimeReads kindly helped me out of it.
While scrolling the new releases recently, I came across a movie called The Comeback Trail. Questions were instantly raised.
What? There’s a new movie with Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Tommy Lee Jones?
Hang on—it was made by George Gallo? The guy who wrote MIDNIGHT RUN, one of the few perfect scripts in Hollywood history? Really?
But it says it was made in 2020. What’s a five-year-old movie doing on the list of new releases?
Waaaaait a minute. Didn’t I hear about this movie five years ago?
And isn’t it a remake of another movie? Why don’t I remember THAT movie?
Questions demand answers. I found ‘em, and CrimeReads made a home for the piece that resulted. It’s about two films that take on the same darkly comic set-up—the producers of a movie plot to kill their star for the insurance—with wildly different approaches. But they also share something else: bad luck. The star-studded version of The Comeback Trail had to contend with a pandemic and lawsuits before being dumped without fanfare on demand years after its planned release date. That’s still preferable to the fate of the original, which was never released at all. It’s a miracle whenever a movie is made. Galaxies must align for it to be made again. But for both versions to then fall through the cracks is a singular curse, one I felt compelled to investigate. I can’t resist a showbiz story, especially one that never clears the lower rungs on the ladder.
Which brings me to this post. The surprise discovery in this rabbit hole was the career of Harry Hurwitz, director of the first Comeback Trail. An outsider who occasionally slipped past Hollywood’s front door, he cobbled together a most unlikely livelihood. Consider what follows to be the deleted scenes from the CrimeReads feature.
Originally a painter, Hurwitz became an instructor of both film and drawing at institutions around New York City. But as he said, “I realized that I’d rather make bad movies than do good teaching.” He started with The Projectionist (1970). The movie, which I discuss in the article, is on YouTube. It’s remembered now for being Rodney Dangerfield’s acting debut, and for its then-innovative use of classic film clips. It became a cult hit—Twentieth-Century Fox briefly toyed with adapting it into a TV series in 1971—but divided critics. Hurwitz grumbled to the Hartford Courant that “It seemed like every reviewer saw a different picture,” citing two raves that ran the same week, one in the Christian Science Monitor, the other in Al Goldstein’s pornographic rag Screw. Richard Schickel, always a pill, loathed what he saw as its witless exploitation of Hollywood history and eviscerated it in Life magazine as “an unconscionable film … lazy and stupid.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the conceit runs out of steam well before the film ends. I much prefer the scenes of Chuck McCann’s lonely title character roaming the streets of Manhattan, captured on the fly in their full Fun City glory.
I’m slotting The Comeback Trail here because it started shooting in 1970, even though … well, read the CrimeReads article to see what happened next. It bears repeating that Hurwitz’s version is not good, but it’s the product of an idiosyncratic comic sensibility. Plus there’s the cast, including Henny Youngman (“I played a horse so slow the jockey kept a diary of the trip”), the trailblazing wild-man comedian Lenny Schultz, and New York television mainstay Joe Franklin, before he played himself in Ghostbusters and Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and was lampooned by Billy Crystal on Saturday Night Live. According to I Want You Around: The Ramones and the Making of Rock ’N’ Roll High School (2023)1 by Stephen B. Armstrong, Hurwitz was fired from his position at NYU “for using student-film labor to make a skin flick called These Raging Loins,” but that’s likely not accurate. These Raging Loins is a film within The Comeback Trail, billed as “the first sexploitation musical” and starring Monti Rock III of Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes fame, so maybe the kids worked on that. Hurwitz’s replacement at NYU was the first student to receive a master’s degree from the school’s film program: Martin Scorsese. (The Comeback Trail is also on YouTube, if you have seventy-five minutes burning a hole in your pocket.)
Next on the Hurwitz filmography is The Eternal Tramp, aka Chaplinesque: My Life and Hard Times, a documentary about Charlie Chaplin narrated by Gloria Swanson listed as a 1972 film although it was actually released in 1967. Hurwitz revered Chaplin; when the silent film titan returned to the United States in 1972 after years in exile to receive his honorary Academy Award, he stopped in New York where Hurwitz was granted an audience. Hurwitz reportedly knelt before Chaplin in homage and said, “You are the greatest single influence in my life.” The Eternal Tramp resurfaced on home video in 1992, a beneficiary of the upsurge in interest surrounding its subject with that year’s release of the biopic Chaplin. That film’s star, Robert Downey Junior, consulted Hurwitz and his extensive collection of Chaplin shorts; Downey had previously worked with Hurwitz, but we’ll get to that.
After a director-for-hire gig on Richard (1972), a pre-Watergate satire of President Nixon he later disowned, Hurwitz took a teaching position at the University of South Florida in Tampa out of economic necessity. He described his tenuous existence in a campus-adjacent apartment to the St. Petersburg Times in 1976: “It’s a little crowded there with three kids, four cats, my wife, me and the Movieola. But that’s where I make movies. At home.” While at USF, he produced a video course called Masters of the Silent Screen that proved so popular it aired on the school’s PBS station for over two decades. And it’s here that I unknowingly crossed paths with Hurwitz for the first time. I attended high school in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area and regularly watched the show, which was larded with lengthy clips.
Hurwitz made educational films for Hall Bartlett, the writer/director who adapted Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)—drop a more ‘70s reference, I dare you—which brought Hurwitz to California and what he called his “second career as Harry Tampa.” Hurwitz characterized his directorial alter ego as “a legend in his own slime,” deploying the pseudonym on projects where he lacked artistic control. The Harry Tampa oeuvre includes Fairy Tales (1978), a Grimm soft-core parody that marks the return of Robert Staats’ sleazy pitchman from The Projectionist and The Comeback Trail, here working as the doorman for the Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe; Auditions (1978), a mockumentary about the casting of an adult film featuring future scream queen Linnea Quigley; and Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula (1979), aptly dismissed by Hurwitz as “that awful disco vampire movie.”2
People often say, “You couldn’t make that movie nowadays,” but it’s definitely true of Under the Rainbow (1981), an honest-to-God studio movie on which Hurwitz shares a writing credit. Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher star in an alleged comedy about Axis spies infiltrating the cast of little people playing the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.3 The adolescent me knew it was garbage but found it funny at the time.
Hurwitz returned to directing under his own name, working with Christopher Lee twice on the Cannonball Run-inspired Safari 3000 (1982) and the Cinemax staple The Rosebud Beach Hotel (1984). Alas, Harry doesn’t warrant a mention in Sir Christopher’s autobiography. Another Hurwitz mockumentary, That’s Adequate (1989), purported to recount the decades-long history of Adequate Pictures and somehow netted not only Downey but Bruce Willis as well. His final film, Fleshtone (1994), stars Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp and was resurrected by the Criterion Channel as part of its ‘90s erotic thriller series. It has its admirers. I am not among them.
But I genuinely admire Harry Hurwitz. He continued to work as a painter throughout his life, and never stopped making films no matter the circumstances. If you asked me to choose a version of The Comeback Trail to watch again and rejected my initial response of “Couldn’t I just sit alone in a dark room for ninety minutes?” I would pick the original, which has a few gags you won’t see anywhere else. Hurwitz said that “the real history of movies” is Orson Welles constantly hustling for money and D. W. Griffith dying while looking for a job. For his efforts he rated a New York Times obituary, and in it he was quoted as saying, “I haven’t made my pictures the easy way.” But he did make them. One of them was even made twice.
Again, read the CrimeReads article for more on both versions of The Comeback Trail.
The Ramones movie was directed by one of Hurwitz’s former students, Allan Arkush.
This might be a good place to point out that I haven’t watched all of these movies, because I’m only willing to take my research so far.
A reminder: cocaine is a hell of a drug.