|
How to connect Old and New Hollywood? Do it like Dillinger, says Godard (Prénom Carmen), play it like a movie, and there's John Milius' ripping debut. The robber (Warren Oates) is Douglas Fairbanks in his own mind, the showman who wants to be remembered introduced bursting through the grilled widescreen that is the bank teller's window: "Those few dollars you lose here are going to buy you stories to tell your children and grandchildren." Ritzy combustion dilated from Penn and Peckinpah, a sharp cut during a chase registers a passerby ran over before the getaway car takes a turn into a hail of police bullets. The dance interrupted at the Arizona fiesta is taken up by the "super gang" in the Indiana spree ("Red River Valley" is the melancholy leitmotif), the hood's opposite number is the FBI bulldog (Ben Johnson) with self-mythologizing rituals of his own—to a rescue drawn verbatim from The Seven Samurai, he adds leather gloves and vengeful cigar. Bandits and coppers, brawling for that sweet newsreel spot. "I'm already a murderer, might as well be famous." Bloody reds brighten the Dust Bowl lighting, the wistful and the anarchic continuously mixed: A Malick pastoral is upended as Baby Face Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) scampers through it in pajamas, his expiring spasm is on the Tommy-gun's trigger. Elsewhere, Pretty Boy Floyd (Steve Kanaly) courtly turns down a matron's Bible before a fusillade while Homer Van Meter's luckless escape accommodates Harry Dean Stanton's ornery comedy. It all builds to the fateful theater in Chicago, just the house of life and death for a barnstorming Movie Brat. (The reunion of Johnson and Cloris Leachman is no accident, this being Milius' The Last Picture Show.) J. Edgar Hoover's disapproval of the film is worn proudly at the close. With Michelle Phillips, Geoffrey Lewis, John P. Ryan, and Frank McRae.
--- Fernando F. Croce |