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L'amour et la mort in the Missouri Dust Bowl, a formulation of seamy transcendence. The young heiress (Kim Darby) is plucked out of high society on a photographer's tip, the original kidnappers are wiped out by the titular hoodlums, their lair becomes her cage. "Well now, it ain't exactly a custom to have a weekend houseguest..." The Grissom boys, the half-wit (Scott Wilson) and the oily Lothario (Tony Musante) and the butterball (Joey Faye), Ma (Irene Dailey) rules the household with iron fist and smoky mustache. One cool million in ransom gets the family into business, "we go big time, legitimate," the hostage's life hangs on a cretin's infatuation. The wry gumshoe (Robert Lansing) and the frowsy tootsie (Connie Stevens) have their roles to play, the heroine's father (Wesley Addy) turns out to be the true monster of the piece. "Got to learn the facts of life sometime." Bonnie and Clyde, Of Mice and Men, The Searchers and The Collector, gleefully chewed up and spat out by Robert Aldrich in a sustained whirl of perverse vehemence. Battered and sloshed, Darby's captive nymphet still has the guile of survival and warms to Wilson's Faulknerian degenerate, whose inflamed devotion trumps familial obligation. (Their love nest, with gaudy crimson walls and a gold-leaf toilet, trades Art Deco for Pop Art.) A persistent sheen of sweat, a hootenanny of squibs at the barricaded nightclub, "more bullets flyin' around than ticks on a cow's back." Suddenly, a brief idyll in a surrounded barn, the affair's beauty and ugliness laid bare and then dissolved before a magnate's glance of disgust. Rudy Vallee has it at the beginning and end, "I can't give you anything but love." Chabrol in Nada shows a rare understanding indeed. With Ralph Waite, Michael Baseleon, Hal Baylor, Matt Clark, Alvin Hammer, Don Keefer and Dots Johnson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |