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Fleischer's The Narrow Margin is the major precedent, Clint Eastwood's comic-strip dilation is a valiant rehabilitation of the classical hero in the midst of Seventies paranoia. A jazzy overture succinctly sketches the blinkered cop with a whiskey bottle shattered on the pavement and a sneer at the Phoenix sunrise, "I just do what I'm told" and what he's told is to head to Las Vegas to escort "a nothing witness for a nothing trial." The hooker (Sondra Locke) is a Finch grad who answers a slap to the face with a kick to the balls, her protector blinks in mock-shock at her saltiness. By ambulance and patrol cruiser and chopper and freight train, "big tin-star egomaniacs" everywhere. To Eastwood the essence of directing is the interplay of building and razing, thus multiple planes framed through a police-car windshield (pink soda cans and dangling handcuffs are keen compositional elements) following the Keaton joke of a bungalow crumbling from a voluminous fusillade. ("God makes house calls," reads a billboard, later rhymed in the pitch-black desert suddenly illuminated by headlights and gun blasts, "God gives eternal life.") The Birds in the phone booth with a helicopter modulates into North by Northwest by way of Chuck Jones, the lines between flatfoot and whore and commissioner and mobster are underlined starkly out of Der Prozeß. "Now I got the big case, and I'm picked to go down with it." Decisive interludes in motel rooms, the lunkhead coming to terms with his illusions and the heroine changing her life with two phone calls, a matter of getting a job done. The armored-bus finale is a remarkable invocation of The Wild Bunch, sometimes taking on the system feels like riding through a storm of bullets. "Can you handle it or should I write it in braille and shove it up your ass?" With Pat Hingle, William Prince, Bill McKinney, and Michael Cavanaugh.
--- Fernando F. Croce |