The man’s eyes flicker beneath tinted lenses. His fingers drum the table. The dealer seated opposite, gracefully underplayed by Roy Scheider, pops the lock of a briefcase. Under the diner’s fluorescent lights, the scene takes on a grotesque, literally off-colour quality.
Drifting beneath the tabletop, William Friedkin’s camera reveals a wire in the fraction of space between the informant’s trouser cuff and his sock. Scheider pauses as he checks the money. His eyes lock on those of the man opposite, striving to penetrate the informant's oversized shades. The glasses mask true motives, even from the audience; our hero is rendered an ineffable blank.
Do we have a problem?, murmurs Scheider.
I first saw this scene on TV, far too young, in 1989, when Britain’s ITV network screened Cliff Richard’s little-seen final film,Wired for Sound, in its uncut form.
On its release, the film was acclaimed for its casting of the former teen idol against type as a morally compromised cocaine user playing Feds and dealers off against one another. The movie’s spare, heartless tone has led critics to liken it to Walter Hill’s Driver or John Boorman’s Point Blank.
Cliff, never seen without his oversized shades, achieves an icy screen presence which calls to mind Alain Delon passing his prime or the ambiguous figures of a Patricia Highsmith novel. (Cliff was sadly never given the chance to perform as Tom Ripley, the role he was born to play).
The film traces the journey of Cliff’s streetwise yet vulnerable resident of the LA demi-monde, as he is torn from a world of short cons and bar work by FBI agent Tom Berenger.
The Bureau selects Cliff as the fall guy for an elaborate, flawed sting operation against drugs baron Roy Scheider. The English ex-pat is ejected from a routine of Venice Beach mornings and smoky jazz nights as his barfly existence takes on the trajectory of tragedy. Cliff finds himself playing kingmaker to an unholy alliance between the respectable face of drug crime and an increasingly corrupt culture of law enforcement.
The precisely observed rhythms of life among the lower strata of the Sunshine State are disrupted; life or death choices are placed in the hands of a nobody; in a satirical anticipation of Nancy Reagan’s press-courting attendance at a real-life LA drugs raid, even the highest office in the land is sullied when Cliff’s character extricates himself from a standoff in a taquería moments before a SWAT team burst in, followed by camera crews and the President’s photogenic son. The directive to ‘Just Say No’ appears live on the television news in a flyblown kitchen just as Cliff rolls a dollar bill to take a freshly cut line, heart still racing from the narrow escape.
I remain haunted by such images, years after their original broadcast. Many in the UK seem to have forgotten the movie, preferring to remember Cliff the pop heartthrob, or the comical figure who has entertained the crowd on so many rained-off Wimbledon afternoons.
A recent documentary by Montse Fernandez Vila focussed on Cliff as victim of the fascist leader Francisco Franco, whose manipulations ensured that Congratulations never received a deserved 1968 Eurovision victory. (The ugly machinations of Romania’s Ceausescu regime against Cheryl Baker of Buck’s Fizz are yet to fully come to light).
Arguably, Wired for Sound marks the singer’s greatest contribution to the cultural life of the English-speaking world. Here he cannot be presented as the happy-go-lucky poster boy of bubblegum democracy. Never had it so good? Under Friedkin’s lens, Cliff’s decaying good looks and wary demeanour evoke exiled poet Czeslaw Milosz:
Ill at ease in the tyranny,
Ill at ease in the republic,
In the one I longed for freedom,
In the other for the end of corruption.
The tense and sceptical mood of the film, perhaps Friedkin’s finest work as well as Cliff’s, epitomises the 1980s, the decade in which the die of my life and so many others was cast.
No number of jade legwarmers stocking the shelves of our malls will ever really evoke the moment captured when Cliff’s own song is performed over a brutal montage of LA street victims during the opening credits:
In the car go to work I’m cruisin’
I never think that I’ll blow all my fuses
Traffic flows – into the breakfast show woh oh woh…
I met a girl and she told me she loved me
I said you love me then love means you must like what I like…
I was a small boy who don’t like his toys
I could not wait to get wired for sound
Great cinema is born of happy accidents in casting or production - yet it remains hard to believe that Friedkin only chose to work with Cliff when the planned To Live and Die in L.A. fell through; harder still to understand why successive generations have neglected the film and relegated it to the late-night slots on obscure cable channels.
If you want to understand Cliff Richard, if you want to understand the 80s, if you want to understand the rise and fall of Reagan’s America, this lost masterpiece holds the key.
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