Rancho Deluxe (1975)

          Because novelist/screenwriter Thomas McGuane’s literary voice was such an enjoyably eccentric component of ’70s cinema (his big-screen work tapered off in subsequent decades), it doesn’t really matter that ’70s films bearing his name have weak stories. What the pictures lack in narrative momentum, they make up for in personality. Rancho Deluxe, written by McGuane and directed by the adventurous Frank Perry, is an offbeat modern Western that’s a comedy by default—which is to say that while the movie has amusing elements, it’s primarily a character study. Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston play Jack and Cecil, low-rent cattle rustlers plaguing a ranch owned by the vituperative John Brown (Clifton James). Eventually, John gets fed up with losing livestock and hires thugs to apprehend the rustlers. First come inept ranch hands Burt (Richard Bright) and Curt (Harry Dean Stanton), both of whom are too horny and lackadaisical to devote much energy toward criminal investigation. Then John brings in a thief-turned-detective, Henry (Slim Pickens), whose idiosyncratic approach mostly involves setting traps and waiting for the rustlers to stumble across his path. Also thrown into the mix are John’s short-tempered wife, Cora (Elizabeth Ashley), and Henry’s hot-to-trot daughter, Laura (Charlene Dallas).

          McGuane mostly eschews dramatic tension, opting instead for closely observed scenes of quirky characters behaving in ways that reveal their nature. There’s a great bit, for instance, when Jack and Cecil kidnap a car and shoot it full of holes, partially to make a point and partially to pass the time. In moments like this, McGuane’s script captures the slow rhythms of rural life, as well as the bedrock Western virtue of rugged individualism. In scene after scene, McGuane ensures that his characters evince surprising dimensions. Consider party girl Mary (Maggie Wellman), who reveals unexpected cultural sophistication with her comment about a dinner spread: “This is a weird mixture of yin and yang—so many animal karmas have bit the dust here.” Elsewhere, Stanton’s character tries to look macho while standing outside John’s mansion and running a vacuum over an Indian rug per instructions from the lady of the house. Virtually every minute of Rancho Deluxe is interesting in some way or another, but that’s not quite enough to compensate for the generally aimless feel of the piece. Nonetheless, there’s a lot to enjoy thanks to McGuane’s quirky writing and the generally lively performances. Pickens and Stanton are the standouts, with Pickens’ down-home bluster and Stanton’s laconic vibe suiting the material especially well, though Bridges, James, and Waterston each provide likeable characterizations.

Rancho Deluxe: FUNKY

Wise Blood (1979)

          By the end of the ’70s, veteran director John Huston had amply demonstrated his ability to change with the times, making a series of hip oddities that stood in sharp contrast to the stuffy museum pieces created by many of his chronological peers during the ‘70s. Of these offbeat pictures, Wise Blood is perhaps the strangest, not only because the underlying material is peculiar but also because Huston presents the story as if it is high comedy—even though the narrative of Wise Blood is a grim compendium of episodes featuring characters gripped by criminal, delusional, self-destructive, and sociopathic impulses. It’s clear that the intent of the picture was to offer broad satire about certain cultural extremes prevalent in America’s Deep South, but it’s difficult to laugh when characters deeply in need of psychiatric intervention court oblivion.

          Based on Flannery O’Connor’s 1962 novel of the same name, the picture follows the exploits of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), a Georgia native who returns home from military service in Vietnam to find that his old life has disappeared—his family skipped town, leaving their home an empty wreck. Unexpectedly adrift, Hazel relocates to the city of Macon and builds relationships with a group of eccentrics living on the fringes of society. Hazel’s new acquaintances include Enoch (Dan Shor), an exuberant young simpleton; Asa (Harry Dean Stanton), a fire-and-brimstone street preacher; and Sabbath (Amy Wright), Asa’s twitchy daughter. Eventually, Hazel decides to start his own religion, which isn’t actually a religion, so he ends up preaching against Jesus on the same street corners where Asa sings the gospels. Meanwhile, an edgy romance between Hazel and Sabbath takes shape, and Enoch follows Hazel around like a puppy. It all gets very bizarre—one of the subplots involves stealing a shrunken corpse from a museum—and the great Ned Beatty joins the story midway through as an opportunistic guitarist/preacher/swindler.

          Although Huston films the story with his customary elegance, blending evocative production design and subtle camerawork to create a vivid sense of place, the arch nature of the characterizations makes it difficult to buy into Wise Blood’s illusions. Dourif seems like a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic in nearly every scene, rendering audience empathy nearly impossible; his performance is unquestionably committed and intense, but it’s a drag to watch. Meanwhile, Shor and Wright incarnate ignorance with painful believably. Only Beatty and Stanton strike a palatable balance between the lightheartedness of Huston’s storytelling and the ugliness of O’Connor’s story. Wise Blood would have been a unique film no matter who sat behind the camera, so it’s doubly impressive that a veteran of Huston’s caliber tackled such challenging material. Alas, novelty alone isn’t enough to make for a rewarding viewing experience.

Wise Blood: FUNKY

Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers (1979)

To avoid any confusion later, it must be stated up front that the TV movie Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers is exactly as awful as its title suggests, though not in the expected way—instead of being lurid or sleazy, the picture is merely dull and insipid. So why note its existence? Well, a number of notable people worked on the project, and in the case of supporting actor Harry Dean Stanton, there’s a minor connection between Flatbed Annieand a famous project that came later. Plus, Flatbed Annie features the one and only acting performance by Billy Carter (pictured), U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s beer-swilling brother. Based on the scant evidence of his one scene, Billy Carter did not miss his calling. To get the synopsis out of the way, Sweetiepie (Kim Darby) is the wife of long-haul trucker Jack (Fred Willard), who gets laid up after an accident and falls behind on truck payments. Sweetiepie decides she needs to deliver a load in Jack’s rig so she can earn money to keep the truck out of hock. In order to achieve this goal, she enlists the aid of Flatbed Annie (Annie Potts), a tough-talking driver. Meanwhile, conniving entrepreneur C.W. Douglas (Stanton) buys Jack’s loan and then tries every angle he can to repossess Jack’s truck so he can sell the rig for cash. That’s the Stanton connection, such as it is—the actor plays a repo man just a few years before portraying another character with the same job in the cult favorite Repo Man(1983). Stanton is the best thing in this terrible movie, whether he’s giving deadpan line deliveries or, in one scene, singing. It’s also (somewhat) interesting to note that Flatbed Anniewas directed by Robert Greenwald, whose other accomplishments in fiction films range from the impressive (the 1984 TV movie The Burning Bed) to the mortifying (the 1980 musical flop Xanadu); today, Greenwald is known for his low-budget liberal-fringe documentaries, such as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005) and Koch Brothers Exposed (2012). As for the leading actors, neither Darby nor Potts benefits from her encounter with this material. Both are abysmal. Darby seems distracted and incompetent, while Potts’ weird performance would only make sense if it were revealed that her character was a drug casualty. Summing up, Flatbed Annie is to be avoided at all costs—except by the morbidly curious.

Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers: LAME

Cisco Pike (1972)

          During the early ’70s, one of the most happening scenes in the music business revolved around the Troubadour club in West Hollywood, the watering hole of choice for folks like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt. Perhaps no single narrative movie captures the texture of this scene better than Cisco Pike, which tells the story of a rock star who turns to dealing grass when his career goes cold. Starring singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson in his first acting role, Cisco Pike exudes atmosphere and authenticity as the storyline winds through nightclubs, recording studios, and the streets of Los Angeles—at its best, the movie almost feels like a documentary capturing what it was like to be high on tunes (and weed) in the City of Angels during a transitional moment between the idealism of the late ’60s and the decadence of the late ’70s.

          The weird part, though, is that Cisco Pike isn’t really a story about the music business. It’s a crime thriller exploring what happens when the title character gets into a hassle with a whacked-out cop who’s playing both sides of the law. The basic story involves an LAPD psycho named Leo Holland (Gene Hackman) forcing rocker-turned-recidivist Cisco (Kristofferson) to sell a huge trove of pot that’s fallen into Holland’s hands. In shaking down his old music-industry contacts for cash, Cisco finds out which friends have integrity and thereby arrives at a new but unsettling understanding of his place in the world. Thanks to this offbeat storyline, viewers can consume Cisco Pike several different ways. For instance, it’s possible to groove on the picture as a nostalgia trip, and it’s also possible to enjoy the narrative’s mild suspense.

          What makes film so rich, besides the colorful details woven into writer-director Bill L. Norton’s script and the extensive location photography, is the lively cast. Beyond Kristofferson, who exudes such powerful natural charisma that he subsequently became a movie star, Cisco Pike benefits from Hackman giving an energetically weird performance as the dirty cop, as well as Harry Dean Stanton blending humor and pathos as the title character’s once-and-future singing partner. The picture also features ’70s stalwarts Allan Arbus, Karen Black, Roscoe Lee Browne, Antonio Fargas, Howard Hesseman, and Severn Darden. For some fans, however, the highlight is a cameo by real-life rocker Doug Sahm, who plays a campy riff on himself—rhapsodizing about the virtues of great ganja and spewing subliterate hipster jive about music, he epitomizes the far-out vibe of stoned ’70s rock.

          It’s easy to find flaws with Cisco Pike, because the movie’s energy is fairly low and because Norton’s filmmaking style is way more conventional than, say, Dennis Hopper’s mind-bending approach, which might have suited this milieu better. But considering how many interesting things Cisco Pike presents in its 95 minutes, complaining that it could have been a stronger picture seems petty.

Cisco Pike: GROOVY

The Missouri Breaks (1976)

          When it’s referred to at all, The Missouri Breaks is generally cited as the movie that derailed Marlon Brando’s ’70s comeback, because after reclaiming prominence with the 1972 double-whammy of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, Brando confounded supporters by delivering such a campy performance in The Missouri Breaksthat he entered the realm of self-parody. Ironically, however, Brando isn’t even the star of this offbeat Western, despite his top billing. The Missouri Breaks is a Jack Nicholson vehicle. But such is the power of Brando’s myth that he dominates the picture—and the picture’s reputation. On one level, it’s a shame the good things in The Missouri Breaks were overshadowed by Brando’s self-indulgence, since the movie’s dialogue has loads of frontier-varmint flavor and the location photography is elegant. Plus, writer Thomas McGuane’s characteristically eccentric storyline takes a fresh approach to ancient themes of revenge and vigilantism. But on another level, Brando’s silly performance is exactly what The Missouri Breaks deserves, since the film is unnecessarily languid and turgid; perhaps a stronger storyline might have motivated Brando to furnish a more streamlined characterization.

          In any event, Nicholson stars as Tom Logan, leader of a grubby band of cattle rustlers operating in Montana. When one of Tom’s accomplices is killed by order of a rural judge named David Braxton (John McLian), Tom purchases a ranch near David’s property with the intention of tormenting his enemy. Meanwhile, David hires a mercenary named Robert E. Lee Clayton (Brando) to smoke out local rustlers. (David is, of course, unaware of Tom’s true identity.) Further complicating matters, Tom courts David’s lonely, willful daughter, Jane (Kathleen Lloyd). The story has a few layers too many, its sprawling flow more suited to a novel than a movie, and McGuane’s script often gets lost in thickets of flavorful chitty-chat; to use a musical analogy, The Missouri Breaks is like a jam in search of a melody.

          Director Arthur Penn, whose previous films Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Little Big Man (1970) so cleverly undercut genre expectations, veers too far (and too inconsistently) away from the mainstream with The Missouri Breaks—the movie toggles between insouciant tomfoolery and numbingly serious drama. In fact, the film is at its best when nothing much is happening onscreen, because simple scenes allow McGuane and Penn to focus on believably mundane rhythms of behavior and characterization. Supporting player Harry Dean Stanton shines in many of these throwaway scenes with his innately laconic vibe. Nicholson’s at a bit of a loss from start to finish, grasping for a central theme around which to build his sloppily rendered character, and Brando—well, it says everything that the actor performs one of his climactic scenes in drag, for no apparent reason. Whether he’s chirping a comical Irish accent, peering around his horse from odd angles, or sulking in a bubble bath, Brando presents a series of goofy sketches in lieu of a proper characterization.

The Missouri Breaks: FUNKY

Cockfighter (1974)

          The strangest thing about Cockfighter is simply that it exists. A meditative character piece about a Southern drifter who makes his life training chickens for death matches with other chickens—and who, for most of the movie, refuses to speak—Cockfighter is daring even by the standards of offbeat ’70s American cinema, if only by dint of the storyline’s inherent ugliness. Did anyone involved in the picture believe that broad audiences would be able to sympathize with a protagonist who leads animals to slaughter for sport and profit? But that’s the ’70s for you, a wild time when brash young filmmakers somehow got funding to put the inner lives of society’s freaks onto the screen. And, indeed, the inner life of Frank Mansfield (Warren Oates) is very much the subject of Cockfighter, which was adapted by Charles Willeford from his novel of the same name. Frank is a self-destructive iconoclast who takes such crazy pride in his skills that he bets all his assets on his feathered killers, then suffers in silence when things don’t go his way.

          At the beginning of the picture, Frank is partway through a long, grueling odyssey to regain his pride. We learn, via flashbacks and narration, that after Frank lost a crucial match some time ago, he swore himself to silence unless he won the Cockfighter of the Year medal. In the grungy universe of this movie, Frank and his colleagues work an underground circuit of formal and informal matches, all of which are governed by an unyielding code of honor. So, just as we see Frank earn the respect of his peers by taking losses gracefully, we see minor characters excoriated for defying accepted methods. In one gruesome scene, for instance, a redneck trainer named Junior (Steve Railsback) gets disqualified for agitating a bird by inserting his (Junior’s) fingers into the bird’s anus. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie—sort of.

          While the content of Cockfighteris frequently repulsive, the actual images are artful, except, of course, during the actual fighting scenes (many of which are filmed in horrific slow-motion). As directed by Monte Hellman, who earned a cult following in the ’70s for his heavily metaphorical character studies, Cockfighteris memorable but undisciplined. Some episodes in the story feel germane while others feel superfluous. Additionally, the portrayal of women in Frank’s life is confounding, since it’s hard to tell whether Frank’s a romantic or a son of a bitch. Further, the movie’s occasional leaps into redneck humor feel out of step with the overall lyrical vibe. Yet Oates is a fascinating presence, as always, his hangdog features perfectly suited for an outsider character with a savage streak, and the invaluable Harry Dean Stanton enlivens several scenes as Frank’s preening, scheming pal. Cockfighter is an odd beast for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the movie is both simplistic and complex—on one level, it’s a superficial exploitation flick, and on another, it’s a ballad of loneliness. With a lot of foul-tempered fowl.

Cockfighter: FREAKY