Fighting Mad (1976)

          Filmmaker Jonathan Demme completed his productive tenure in Roger Corman’s B-movie operation with this uneven but watchable action picture about a principled redneck standing up to greedy developers. There’s nothing even slightly original about the plot, but as writer and director, Demme fills the picture with just enough idiosyncratic flourishes to keep things interesting during the beginning and middle of the story. Then, during the climax, Demme unleashes an exciting nighttime showdown replete with not only gunplay but also, for novelty’s sake, death by bow and arrow. Peter Fonda (of course) stars as Tom Hunter, a young man who returns to his family’s home in Arkansas only to discover that every private landowner in the immediate vicinity is under pressure from operatives of real-estate mogul Pierce Crabtree (Philip Carey). Crabtree wants to raze low-income homes to make way for a shopping mall, and he won’t take no for an answer, so his goons use lethal force to frighten citizens into selling. Among those who fall victim to Crabtree’s thugs are Tom’s brother, Charlie (Scott Glenn), and his wife. This pushes Tom into ass-kicking mode. Meanwhile, Tom manages his relationships with his young son, Dylan (Gina Franco); his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Lorene (Lynn Lowry); and his salt-of-the-earth father, Jeff (John Doucette), whose property is in Crabtree’s crosshairs.

          The best parts of Fighting Mad feature Tom sticking it to the man, because the tension between Fonda’s laconic persona and his character’s righteous passion is consistently interesting. The star is fun to watch whether he’s commandeering a tractor, planting explosives at a Crabtree work site, or shooting arrows into henchmen. Whenever the action hits a lull, however, so does the movie. Demme’s storytelling is choppy—every time it seems Fighting Mad has kicked into gear, Fonda’s character stops for a beer or a tumble with his girlfriend. Demme also lingers on pointless bits like musical performances, continuing his endearing/irritating career-long habit of losing the forest for the trees. Production values in Fighting Mad are fairly strong for a Corman production, since Demme focuses on real locations with loads of texture, and the performances get the job done; Doucette and Glenn in particular lend humanity to their small roles. However, the music score, by folk musician and frequent Fonda collaborator Bruce Langhorne, is all over the place—the old-timey bits with lots of banjo suit the milieu, while the electronic suspense stings hit their target but seem pulled from another movie.

Fighting Mad: FUNKY

Caged Heat (1974)

          Retrospect can be dangerous when writing about cinema, because critics and scholars occasionally color readings of vintage films with considerations that weren’t relevant at the time the pictures were released, thus arriving at a skewed sense of significance. To see how the process works, consider Caged Heat, a grimy women-in-prison picture issued by Roger Corman’s B-movie outfit in 1974. The flick is just as sleazy as any other entry in the genre, but because Caged Heat’s writer-director, Jonathan Demme, subsequently became respectable, there’s a temptation to scrutinize the picture for signs of artistic merit. And, indeed, one could offer an extraordinarily generous reading in which Caged Heat becomes a quasi-feminist statement about oppressed women breaking the bonds of patriarchal society. What that reading sidesteps, of course, is the actual content of the movie—the endless shower scenes of attractive women soaping their erogenous zones, the unpleasant sequences of half-dressed and/or naked women getting tortured, and so on.

          Therefore, in order to accept the categorization of Caged Heat as an important early work by Demme—whose later films are generally quite sensitive to gender issues—one must pretend the picture was made entirely with good intentions. And while I have no doubt that Demme was as humanistic an individual in the mid-’70s as he is today, it’s inarguable that Caged Heat was, at the time its release, simply the latest in a cycle of revolting grindhouse offerings about chicks doing lurid things behind bars. Furthermore, Caged Heat has even less of a narrative than many other entries in the genre, because the movie gets mired in such pointless sequences as a talent show put on by the distaff inmates.

          Anyway, here’s the story, such as it is. After Jacqueline (Erica Gavin) gets bushed on drug charges, she falls prey—along with her cellblock sisters—to the perverse machinations of Superintendent McQueen (Barbara Steele), the prison’s butch, wheelchair-bound warden. Breakout attempts and loss of life ensue. Along the way, Jacqueline fades into the background while fellow inmate Belle (Roberta Collins) emerges as the picture’s dominant character. Even though it’s only 83 minutes long, Caged Heat is boring as hell thanks to Demme’s meandering script and the weird tension between his professional obligation to deliver the T&A goods and his apparent desire to imbue the picture with redeeming qualities. In the end, Caged Heat isn’t lighthearted enough to qualify as escapism, and it isn’t substantial enough to quality as anything else—except, perhaps, a distasteful footnote to the career of an acclaimed filmmaker.

Caged Heat: LAME

Last Embrace (1979)

          Director Jonathan Demme continued his steady climb from the quagmire of exploitation flicks to the rarified realm of mainstream movies with this intelligent but underwhelming homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Just as Brian De Palma did in his various tributes to the “Master of Suspense,” Demme emulates myriad tropes associated with Hitchcock—convoluted plotting through which the discovery of a simple object eventually leads to the revelation of a perverse conspiracy; elaborate action scenes involving iconic locations; the presence of a woman who’s either an angel or a devil, or both; and so on. Last Embrace even features music by veteran composer Miklós Rózsa, who scored the Hitchcock classic Spellbound(1945) and whose music for Last Embraceechoes the style of Hitchock’s most revered composer, Bernard Hermann. About the only thing Last Embrace doesn’t have that one normally associates with Hitchcock’s work is a crackerjack story. Instead, the turgid narrative—adapted by Michael Shaber from a book by Murray Teigh Bloom—stirs up danger and mystery without generating much in the way of emotional involvement.

          Roy Scheider stars as an American spy named Harry Hannan. In a prologue, Harry’s wife is killed during a bizarre standoff with an underworld figure. The story then cuts forward several months and dramatizes Harry’s attempt to reenter his professional life, despite having spent the intervening time receiving psychiatric care. The reason for all this backstory is to put viewers on edge once Harry starts to suspect that he’s been targeted for murder—is he a marked man, we are meant to wonder, or is he just nuts? The story then adds another layer of mystery, which is related to doctoral student Ellie Fabian (Janet Margolin), who rented Harry’s New York apartment during his hospitalization. Eventually, Last Embrace‘s scope broadens to encompass such random elements as academic rivalries, Old Testament lore, and prostitution. Things get a bit difficult to follow after a while, and a lot of the story strands feel underdeveloped.

          Nonetheless, Scheider’s a great fit for this sort of material, with his slow-burn line deliveries and wiry build making him quite convincing as a man of action on the verge of snapping. Alas, the script never lets him soar. Meanwhile, Margolin is likeable and pretty but hampered by a confused characterization and limited dramatic skills. Worse, there’s zero chemistry between the two, which renders the narrative’s romantic angle inert. Last Embrace features some highly enjoyable sequences, such as a bell-tower shootout between Scheider and a fellow spy (Charles Napier). Further, the film’s finale (which is set at Niagara Falls) has atmosphere to burn, and it’s interesting to watch Last Embrace in order to spot early attempts at cinematic devices that Demme revisited, to much stronger effect, in the 1991 masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs; for instance, the way he probes Last Embrace locations with a Steadicam represents a dry run of sorts for the way he used the same camera rig in The Silence of the Lambs.

Last Embrace: FUNKY