Themes: Rise and Fall Stories, Mothers and Sons, Infidelity
Main Cast: Ahna Capri, Rip Torn
Release Year: 1972
Country: US
Run Time: 102 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
A musician finds his life and his career jumping off the rails in this moody, intelligent drama. Maury Dann (Rip Torn) is a singer and songwriter struggling to hold onto his footing as one of the top names in country & western music. This being 1972, long before the Nashville sound had gone "mainstream," Dann has a new Cadillac and a small entourage to show for his efforts, but most of his shows are one-nighters at beer-soaked honky tonks in the Deep South. Onstage Maury Dann comes off as a soft-hearted good ol' boy, but off the stand, Dann is a mean-spirited hell raiser with a nearly unquenchable appetite for booze, pills, and women. Over the course of a seemingly typical day and a half, Dann steals a fan's girlfriend; ditches his longtime mistress, Mayleen (Anna Capri); picks up a naïve groupie named Rosamond (Elayne Heilveil) and gives her a crash course in life on the road; fires his guitar player (and best friend) and hires a starry-eyed teenager as his replacement; tries to bribe a disc jockey with booze and free records; has a harrowing run-in with his speed-addicted mother (Cara Dunn); discovers he's missed his son's birthday by four months; and, in cahoots with his manager, Clarence (Michael C. Gwynne), fast-talks his loyal driver, cook, and gofer, Chicago (Cliff Emmich), into taking a possible murder rap. While Payday earned excellent reviews (particularly for Rip Torn's superb performance as Maury Dann) and a handful of awards (Daryl Duke's direction won him a citation from the National Association of Film Critics, while Don Carpenter's screenplay received a prize from the Writer's Guild of America) the film's downbeat themes made it a tough sell. However, Payday gained a cult following, and more than one "outlaw" country star of the 1970s has been said to claim the film was based on his own true story. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
In the early '70s, stalwart character actor Rip Torn got juicy leading roles in a trio of independently produced films: as Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer, as a psychiatrist secretly filming his trysts with female patients and other lovers in Coming Apart, and as country singer Maury Dann in this wild ride, easily the best of the bunch. Dann is a hell-raising country singer in the grand if not glorious tradition of Hank Williams. He is unapologetically ornery and selfish, and if he weren't so damned charming about it, you'd want to take a poke at him. Don Carpenter's sharp script demonstrates the allure of Maury's world to several innocents (a groupie, a teenaged guitarist), but Carpenter, through his portrayal of the resourceful and ultimately self-absorbed Maury, makes it clear that the music business is not for the faint of heart. According to Payday, not everyone making, selling, or broadcasting music is evil, but there are more opportunities for those people who are. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Cast
Henry O. Arnold - Ted; Walter Bamberg - Bridgeway; Clara Dunn - Mama Dann; Cliff Emmich - Chauffeur; Eleanor Fell - Galen Dann; Michael Gwynne - Clarence; Elayne Heilveil - Rosamond; Bill Littleton - Process Server; Winton McNair - Highway Policeman; Jeff Morris - Tally; Sonny Shroyer - Dabney; Bobby Smith - Lyman Pitt; Linda Spatz - Sandy; Earle Trigg - Disk Jockey; Rip Torn - Maury Dann; Richard Hoffman - Foggy Bottom Yonce; Ahna Capri - Mayleen; Ed Neeley - Abe; Michael Edwards - Restaurant Manager
Credit
Don Carpenter - Co-producer, Gary Grillo - First Assistant Director, Daryl Duke - Director, Richard Halsey - Editor, Ralph J. Gleason - Executive Producer, Ed Bogas - Composer (Music Score), Ed Bogas - Musical Direction/Supervision, Ian Tyson - Songwriter, Shel Silverstein - Songwriter, Sylvia Tyson - Songwriter, Tommy McKinney - Songwriter, Richard C. Glouner - Cinematographer, Martin Fink - Producer, Hal Etherington - Sound/Sound Designer, Richard Portman - Sound/Sound Designer, Stephen W. Carpenter - Screenwriter, Don Carpenter - Screenwriter
