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"A better man, a better officer, and a better American," hiding dead eyes behind dark glasses to face the band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" during his return from hell. After nearly a decade in a Viet Cong prison, the Air Force major (William Devane) in the uncanny netherworld of San Antonio domesticity. A stranger to his young son, he smokes quietly in a half-lit living room while his wife (Lisa Blake Richards) reveals she's been seeing a local policeman (Lawrason Driscoll). He briefly twitches back to life only when reenacting bone-cracking torture in his garage, confiding in the other feller the secret way to beat the tormentor: "You learn to love the rope." Paul Schrader's script is a theorem given flesh by Heywood Gould's rewrite and jolted by John Flynn's clenched camera, what emerges is a pure distillate of Seventies blunt force. A box of silver coins is a symbol for unimaginable ordeal and a lure for greedy bandits, the protagonist proves himself "one macho motherfucker" only to see his family wiped out and his hand shredded in the kitchen's garbage disposal. The hook prosthesis he comes to wield is a fine perversion of The Best Years of Our Lives, his metallic hardness contrasts with Linda Haynes' remarkable sense of worn life as the self-declared groupie he brings on his vengeful spree, the hollow meeting the damaged. "Why do I always get stuck with crazy men?" "That's the only kind that's left." The vision of shattered men aching for warfare is crystallized as the fellow vet (Tommy Lee Jones) is roused from his zombified torpor by the prospect of a cleansing bloodbath, the Mexican bordello makes for a handy battlefield substitute. "Rest you, charger, rust you, bridle..." With James Best, Dabney Coleman, Luke Askew, James Victor, Jordan Gerler, and Cassie Yates.
--- Fernando F. Croce |