After retiring from the adult film business in 1987 for a more conventional life in Hawaii, director Bob Chinn eventually moved back to the lower 48 and settled with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he became a successful camera salesman at Kurt’s Camera Corral. It wasn’t long, though, before the filmmaking bug got the better of Chinn when, in 1991, the stars aligned which afforded him the opportunity to take a swing at a mainstream feature film.
Of course, there were many astrological mishaps before the stars aligned and, when they did, they didn’t quite make up the constellation initially dreamed up between Bob and his then-wife Debbie. In the beginning, the feature project was envisioned to be a two-hander called Blonde Venus starring Linda Stirling and Peggy Stewart, two actresses whose resumes stretched back to the Republic and Columbia serial westerns of the 40’s. However, when the floor dropped out due to financial concerns with another project to which the main producer was tied, Chinn and Larry Landon, friend of Chinn’s who was also a manager at Kurt’s and an instrumental piece of getting the project started in the first place, greatly reduced their sights. Back to the typewriter Debbie went and, this time, she pounded out a confessional character drama called Adobe Angels, that was a little bit of Kurosawa’s adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths sprinkled with a bitter dash of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, all shot in Albuquerque in March of 1991 in 16mm with a total production budget of $6,000.
Set over the course of a few days at the Pioneer Motel, a desolate roadside spillover for the lost and the broken, Adobe Angels centers on Karen Crawford (Debbie Chinn), native of Houston, Texas who spent ten years in L.A. trying to become an actress before running out of money in Albuquerque en route home. For two years, she’s been working at the Hog Heaven Bar-B-Q joint where she is mercilessly picked on by Harriet (Diane Becker), a waitress whose scary eyebrows and caked-on rouge makes her come on like Flo if played with dark energy by Grace Zabriskie. One day, she meets Sam Weatherby (Kevin Wiggins), an affable rodeo rider with roots in Midland who immediately falls for her and wants to whisk her away from her misery.
Karen spends most of her nights chatting with Harry Lister (Marcellus “Bear Heart” Williams), a kindly Native American man who was once an extra in a handful of John Ford films and is currently waiting for Ford to return as he was promised a role in his next film. When she’s not working at the Hog Heaven, she spends her days going on auditions and writing unsent letters to her parents in Houston about all of the wonderful acting opportunities in her life which, of course, is far from the truth. In and out of her life are the other residents of the motel including the erudite Mr. Ryan (John Bauer), the wild Vanessa (Rita Rodgers), the mysterious Mr. McIntyre (Adam Ford), and Carlotta (Bonnie Cobb), the busybody landlady whose measure of a person is whether or not they pay their rent on time.
The themes of Adobe Angels mostly center around a philosophical treatise on struggle and the value of it. It’s not quite a celebration of the grind, but it is both a reckoning with it and a plea to make peace with it. And along with the film’s very calm philosophy, Chinn gets to really stretch himself out, taking his time with some of the dialogue scenes where each line feels carefully considered. Long, meditative passages abound as Adobe Angels is a pretty quiet and sanguine film and, in what ends up being a perfect match with the material, it shares the same kind visual elegance found in all of Chinn’s films. Slow dollies and dynamic lighting schemes (the latter of which Chinn employed with gusto in his noir-based adult films) all feel part of the package any astute viewer of his movies will recognize for all of the things that were part of Chinn’s body of work that set him apart from many of his contemporaries in the adult world are all on full display in Adobe Angels. And if he’s only hampered by what $6,000 could buy you (for example, the entire cast worked for nothing), it’s not much of an actual handicap. Sure, there might be performance here or there that is a little flatter than one would like, but it’s worth the trade to get a dynamite, proud, and heartfelt piece of work like the one Marcellus Williams gives for free. There is not a second that he’s on screen in which he doesn’t hold the viewer’s rapt attention.
Around the forty five minute point in Adobe Angels, Chinn finds the time to shift to a brief color sequence which chronicles a communal celebration accompanied by rhythmic percussion where the joyful spirits being evoked are those being conjured the direct opposite of a similar, more sinister sequence in the climax of 1973’s The Devil’s Garden. Its left-field quality also recalls the wild surrealism of the group therapy waiting room in Hard Soap, Hard Soap. It might try the patience of some viewers, but like the spectacular, belt-loosening gypsy dance in Chinn’s piece of Ed and Summer Brown’s The Prey, when Chinn could find his way out of the restrictive confines of adult films, he was going to luxuriate in purely cinematic moments whenever he could. Not only did it satisfy a kind of wild artistic itch he always possessed but it also gave him the opportunity to indulge in one of his great pleasures, namely “running film through a camera.” Generally, the results were hypnotic and dazzling.
Adobe Angels touts the best soundtrack in a Bob Chinn film since Tropic of Desire in 1979 as it features a nice cross-selection of country tunes with the occasional surprise dropping in from time to time (Marianne Faithful’s version of “As Tears Go By” gets a fine day in court). The ghostly utilization of songs Hank Williams, George Jones, Claude King, Lefty Frizell, Patsy Cline, Faron Young, and Carl Smith as they echo through the brick structure of the lonely motel and in the diner is reminiscent of The Last Picture Show. This gives the film a haunted and lonely quality as if the film itself is on the edge of an outburst, which is perfectly captured by cinematographer John Dirlam (who, in Chinn’s previous life, was known as Jack Remy) in absolutely gorgeous black and white. The choice of may have been one of the things that cost Chinn when he tried to to sell the film to a distributor but, artistically, it was the right call. This is one gorgeous movie that drips with a true sense of desolation, despair, and frustration.
“Even at my best, it’s not good enough,” Karen bemoans early in the film. Recounting the failures and setbacks that have caused her dream of being an actress to slip away, it’s clear that there is a lot of Debbie in Karen’s character. But if Adobe Angels were just her story, it wouldn’t work as well. For the film is also Bob Chinn’s story. Hemmed into the world of adult films pretty much at their inception, he, too, never got a chance to really show what he was capable of in the mainstream world (Karen’s line that she “worked in LA for ten years and what do I have to show for it?” might as well have been co-written by Bob). Adobe Angels is a movie written by an actress who wants to prove she can do it and directed by a guy with the exact same goal. Despite the fact that, outside a couple of premiere showings, it never found the backing it needed to give it a release, it’s a fine example of the indie filmmaking rush that began to swirl in the early to mid eighties with John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and the Coen Brothers and then broke open in 1989 with Seven Soderbergh and Whit Stillman. Despite its obscurity, Bob’s tiny-budgeted human drama belongs in the latter class just as much as his hardcore work in the 70’s felt like an outsider voice in the class of New Hollywood filmmakers who were raised on movies and went to film school.
After all, Bob Chinn’s love of John Ford was maybe only surpassed by Peter Bogdanovich’s, and that’s with a heavy emphasis on the “maybe”.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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