“When Mitchell finally reaches the tube,” Boston Globe movie critic Kevin Kelly wrote in his review of the 1975 film, “you can alleviate its unending boredom by looking forward to the commercials.” Kelly was right that the movie needed an upgrade, and that TV would provide it. But it turns out there was a better way to alleviate the unending boredom of Mitchell.
The movie, in which Baker plays the slobbish cop who gives the film its name, is shown in one of the funniest episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. In Joel Hodgson’s last episode, he and the bots absolutely ravage Mitchell star Joe Don Baker. They mock his weight. They howl in disgust at a sex scene. “He looks like a middle-aged Chucky,” Tom Servo says. The phrase “chubby blue line” is spoken.
Apparently, Joe Don Baker was furious. Joel’s replacement, Mike Nelson, debuted in the Mitchell episode. “He got a little ticked off about being asked questions (by the media) about our sendup of the movie,” Nelson said. “Joe Don Baker said something like, ‘I’d love to kick their asses.’” Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo, said Baker was probably kidding.
I hope so. Because part of the genius of that episode comes from Baker himself, who died on May 7 at the age of 89. The best MST3K episodes end up re-contextualizing the movie being mocked into a new piece of artwork. The movie has to be just right for this to work. Some movies are too bad to mock, and Mitchell wouldn’t have made for such a classic episode if not for Baker. The script is confusing and incomprehensible. It’s obnoxious when it tries to be funny. The version MST3K uses is the TV edit, which forgets about John Saxon’s character halfway through. There are multiple parking scenes, and some very slow car chases. “This is what I’ll remember when I think of the movie Mitchell,” Crow says during one of those. “And I will think of it.”
I think of it, too. Baker plays Mitchell as a sarcastic, hung over, bumbling-yet-competent cop in a way that feels real; the character is as fully inhabited as its obvious inspiration, Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, but the movie around it is much goofier. It’s great, in a way. Audiences had previously cheered Baker as the lawbreaking sheriff in Walking Tall, but in Mitchell he is never anything but deeply unpleasant to watch—unless a dude and some robots are making fun of him constantly.
Baker was a leading man for a bit. Walking Tall was the semi-semi-autobiographical tale of Buford Pusser, an ex-pro wrestler who became a sheriff in Tennessee and battled the mob. The movie version of Pusser returns to his hometown and runs for sheriff after seeing the ways in which crime and corruption have taken over the place he cared about. He cracks down on crime in the most literal possible way. He swings hickory clubs. He breaks some laws to enforce others. The end of the movie involves him avenging his wife’s murder and saving the town by driving his patrol car into a building. Naturally, audiences ate this law-and-order shit up.
Movies about cops and vigilantes who didn’t take any crap were in vogue. In 1967, an outlaw biker movie called The Born Losers reportedly made $36 million; a 1971 sequel focusing on the Billy Jack character earned $98 million.
Walking Tall was advertised as “this year’s Billy Jack.” It combined the vigilante justice of Billy Jack with the classic lite-fascist cop-who-plays-by-his-own-rules trope. It got decent reviews, although it probably didn’t need them. “A huge hit already in Middle America, Walking Tall had started in late 1973 to infiltrate the city via Staten Island and other suburban outposts of law-and-order and gun-worship,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice when the movie hit Manhattan the following year. “Walking Tall is saying something very important to many people, and it is saying it with accomplished artistry.” Many reviews had that take: This was a movie The People were clamoring for.
“When Buford began to clobber the bad guys, people in the audience cried out, ‘Get ’em, get ’em!’—and they weren’t kidding,“ Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker. “I’m told that in parts of the South it is a ritual that at the end audiences stand in homage and cheer; in New York, audiences scream and shout their assent to each act of vengeance that the towering hero takes upon his enemies. I’ve heard of people who have already seen it twice and are going back.” The movie sputtered at first, but audiences were ready for it and reacted in time to make it a hit. “The manager at the Pantages Theater here told me that even when the house was one-third filled, the audience stood up and applauded,” said Charles Pratt, the head of producer Bing Crosby Productions. “It was the same everywhere.”
People liked Baker in it. “Joe Don Baker gives a magnificent performance as the club-wielding Puritanical sheriff,” Sarris wrote. “Baker’s Buford has the mighty stature of a classic hero; he seems like a giant from the earth,” Kael wrote. A turn as a contract killer in the neo-noir Charley Varrick earned him more praise. His 1975 movie Framed similarly earned him shouts from theater audiences. “People cheer as the fellow’s ear dissolves into a bloody pulp,” Emerson Batdorff wrote in The Plain Dealer. “And there are more cheers later when the fellow, one-eared but game, remains adamant and big skin has to hook him up to the ignition system of an automobile to get him talking.”
Baker kept playing similar characters, but none of them hit as much as Walking Tall, and much of his later career is in supporting roles. He’s in The Natural and three James Bond movies. He’s pretty good in Cape Fear. MST3K also spoofed his last outlaw-cop movie, Final Justice.
That episode’s not as good. But both episodes, especially Mitchell, introduced a whole new audience to the concept of Leading Man Joe Don Baker. Walking Tall is remembered, but not a classic; in a cursory survey of my friends the remake with The Rock is better known. But they all knew Mitchell. The MST3K episode works because the jokes are funny, but they also work because Joe Don Baker plays his sad-sack cop so well that he becomes an object to be laughed at. Baker didn’t know it at the time, but he’d made a classic comedy—a movie that would endure in ways that no one involved likely intended, but which is very real all the same.
Correction (4:18 p.m. ET): Kevin Murphy did the voice of Tom Servo, not the voice of Crow, on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The post has been amended.