The Dion Brothers

The director turns up on a flickering telly to voice the alternate title, "this here country we got here ain't nothin' but a big ol' gravy train." A whiff of Godard and Gorin's Tout Va Bien carries the opening, the private uprising at the assembly line is resumed at the coal mine, West Virginia to Washington. D.C. with the eponymous fratelli (Stacy Keach, Frederic Forrest). "Here's to the Dion brothers. The Yankees can call the dogs and piss on the fire, cuz we're right here." To open a seafood restaurant is the dream, robbing an armored truck is the most logical way for obtaining funds. Even while wielding dynamite sticks before bound guards, a peculiar innocence seeps through the manic bravado of these larcenous rubes. "You guys ever been stuck up before?" "First time." "Pretty neat, huh?" Quite the shaggy hootenanny, a homegrown pipe dream cracked open by Jack Starrett for one grubby marvel after another. (The Terrence Malick script clinches the connection to Rosenberg's Pocket Money.) The fellows are double-crossed by the gangland partner (Barry Primus), before that they savor the afterglow of the heist at a swank restaurant, where Keach parks his chewing gum behind his ear while Forrest orders the "phil-et ming-non." A visit to a massage parlor cuts to the National Mall obelisk fully erect, a two-shot on a park bench with the Capitol Dome in the distant background is sustained until the quizzical moll (Margot Kidder) walks by. "I'm gonna shake him like a side of fries and then I'm gonna stick up a tuba up his wazoo and play 'Dixie' for about a week." Interrogation with a live lobster, shootout with a wrecking ball. An epitaph in the rubble, "name a fish dish after me." Wes Anderson in his first and best film is an unexpected heir. With Richard Romanus, Denny Miller, Clay Tanner. Robert Phillips, and Paul Dooley.