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LITTLE ODESSA (1994)

A new season (Season 16) in a new year (2026 CE), and The Good, The Pod, and The Ugly returns to its roots with its unpatented temporal pincer movement covering the directorial filmography of American auteur James Gray. And in keeping with this homecoming, we begin our Touch of Gray Season with the Gen X filmmaker’s first feature endeavor LITTLE ODESSA (1994).

Made at the unripened age of twenty-three after being recruited out of USC film school, Gray’s inaugural film is a mixture of the highly personal (reflecting his own mother’s terminal brain cancer, father’s temper, and family’s Slavic Jewish émigré origins) with trappings of the crime genre (hitman with ice cold blood in his veins returns to the one place he promised never to return, viz. New York City, i.e. Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach a.k.a. Little Odessa), each and together building to a profoundly unhappy ending.

Thanks to Brit producer Paul Webster who recruited Gray for this first film, Gray was able to bring on Tim Roth fresh from his acclaimed performance in Reservoir Dogs who was able to attract Edward Furlong, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, and Moira Kelly. Gray and team worked around losing a week to a record-setting blizzard in NYC, some days with only four hours to shoot, to create this two-hander crime+family (but not “crime family”) drama with the dominant hand played by Roth as the older brother hitman and other hand by Furlong as the younger brother under his father’s thumb and regularly truant from school. Redgrave and Schell play their parents. Kelly, two years removed from The Cutting Edge and Fire Walk with Me, plays Roth’s love interest. And fewer of these characters will be alive by the end of this film than you might expect outside of a Greek tragedy.

This week, additional research by Ken who watched the film within the film (Vengeance Valley, 1951), Ryan who explored Jewish funeral rites, and Thomas who on mic clarifies the actual size of Little Odessa.

Oh, and in a callback to the preceding Season 15, there are some satisfyingly strong squibs.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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Podcast: goodpodugly
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias