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The title freeze-frames on a bare ass and the postscript dispenses tragic details, in between there's the gift of allowing things to be discovered. Chicago brothers, one (Jesse Vint) is a Dennis Hopper stunt-double and the other (Alan Vint) is a Dogpatch Belmondo, on a joyride across the South before heading into the military. Caught in fragrant delight at the red-light district, meandering down the road for the impounded convertible, stuck in Hicksville with the comely hitchhiker (Cheryl Waters). "If the Lord was gonna give the world an enema, right here is where He'd stick the hose." Plenty of sweaty flavor to go around, down to a vaudeville routine between Geoffrey Lewis and Doodles Weaver about a pregnant mare. Then the fun darkens, and the skirmish with the deputy (Max Baer Jr.) is put in characteristically plainspoken terms: "Something horrible happened and he thinks we did it." A sort of drive-in Faulkner leisurely emerges, a dollop of American Gothic at the tail's end of a hedonistic spree. A glance of afternoon friskiness is the lawman's last memory of his wife (Joan Blackman) before she turns up as a violated corpse courtesy of crooks on the lam (Timothy Scott, James Gammon), their young son (Leif Garrett) figures in the stark dénouement. (A burnt-orange dream on a nocturnal car ride braids the themes of family and violence.) Joe McCarthy on a grainy TV screen, miniature Confederate flags sewn into uniforms, the tiny cadet broken with rifle in hand—a pungent little snapshot of segregated Dixie, filmed with flashes of luxuriance by Richard Compton in rural California. Eastwood's A Perfect World benefits noticeably from it. With Sam Gilman, Emile Meyer, Avil Williams , and Jay Adler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |