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The title is vagabond lingo for empty honor, the wasteland to be ruled at the end of an extended donnybrook. "Never laugh at the devil." "I ain't laughin'." The backdrop is the Great Depression, the tone is vicious folklore, just brutes and machines in the wilderness. Hobos versus the Railroad Man (Ernest Borgnine), a barbarous Picasso bull who'd "rather kill a man than give him a free ride." His opposite number is the junkyard champ (Lee Marvin) whose mission is to hop his train, and who thinks nothing of setting fire to the caboose when cornered. Between them is the laddish braggart (Keith Carradine) working on his own myth. "There was a day a dump had quality. But by God, the trash in this country has gone to hell!" Robert Aldrich's rat-nest grand opera, "tramp royale," virile as can be. Wellman is the mainstay (Beggars of Life, Wild Boys of the Road), a rough-hewn screen filled with combustible movement and plug-uglies. Grease on the tracks, razzing in the mist, an iron spike tied to a rope and thrown to maim undercarriage stowaways. (Amid these masculine games, the only women spotted are a shaved armpit by the wagon window and damp nipples in the baptism river.) "Twenty miles in an empty stockcar... That's just coppin' a feel." The camera moves from the geometry of a trestle bridge to a sprawling overhead view of the rubbish-strewn creek, where Marvin puffs on a stogie. The damndest thing, not quite a road movie, not quite a buddy picture, bruisingly political and epically funny in its vision of cavemen challenges etched on water towers and locomotives chugging into the void. Hammers and chains and axes for the macho reductio ad absurdum, Konchalovsky's Runaway Train takes it from there. With Charles Tyner, Matt Clark, Liam Dunn, Simon Oakland, Malcolm Atterbury, Elisha Cook Jr., Harry Caesar, Vic Tayback, Hal Baylor, Robert Foulk, Jack Collins, John Steadman, and Sid Haig.
--- Fernando F. Croce |