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Love and death, "always a good subject for a song." For the opening Clint Eastwood has an incantation of The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers, out of the dust storm barrels the dilapidated roadster and out of the roadster tumbles the pickled uncle. A luckless guitar-picker gulping bootleg hooch to cool his wheezing lungs, he passes by the cotton farm on his way to the Grand Ole Opry and takes along his teenage nephew (Kyle Eastwood). Raiding chicken coops, breaking out of jail, visiting brothels, a picaresque tour of the Depression out of Twain, bee-stung bull and all. Remembrances before a crumby horizon for Grandpa (John McIntire), the stowaway is an aspiring chanteuse (Alexa Kenin) who can't quite get through "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean." "Maybe in an amateur contest with a braying jackass you might stand a chance!" The rambling artist's existence (cf. Ray's The Lusty Men), the lifeworn comedy of Eastwood playing straight-man to a chorus of piquant comedians (Barry Corbin, Tim Thomerson, Tracey Walter) while tubercular tragedy waits in the wings. Torchy blues at the Beale Street dance hall followed by a moment of clarity in the darkened void, "that's the life of a country singer." (Louis Glanzman's Honkytonk-U.S.A. is a model of composition, patiently and delicately absorbed into a deep-focus widescreen.) The epitaph for the musician out of time is a recording made before blood drowns his voice—the camera circles Eastwood at the microphone while his real-life son watches from the studio booth, the filmmaking process and the progression of life simultaneously distilled. Promised lands and fleeting harmonies, "we'll get through this night the best way we can." The final juxtaposition of cemetery and melody goes into Gran Torino. With Verna Bloom, Matt Clark, Jerry Hardin, Macon McCalman, Joe Regalbuto, Gary Grubbs, Linda Hopkins, and Marty Robbins.
--- Fernando F. Croce |