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

High-Ballin’ (1978)

          While it’s unmistakably a drive-in action flick about truckers, High-Ballin’ has a much more serious vibe than its silly poster and title might suggest. In fact, within the confines of being a clichéd thrill ride about cartoonish villains preying upon one-dimensional heroes, the picture has a more or less credible storyline, as well as a few passages of comparatively heavy drama. So, while the movie ultimately succumbs to mediocrity, it goes down a lot smoother than the usual “10-4, good buddy” junk. Set in Ontario, the picture depicts a rapidly escalating battle between independent drivers and thugs in the employ of King Carroll (Chris Wiggins), a trucking magnate who’s trying to put competitors out of business. King Carroll’s chosen technique is hiring attractive women to feign roadside trouble as a way of luring truckers into the proximity of armed hijackers who emerge from hiding to beat the truckers and steal their rigs.

          When the story starts, amiable trucker Duke (Jerry Reed) greets old friend Rane (Peter Fonda), a former trucker now living a vagabond lifestyle as a born-t0-be-wild biker. Together with Rane’s new love interest, a tough-talking lady trucker named “Pickup” (Helen Shaver), Duke and Rane try to survive hauling a shipment through King Carroll’s territory. The highlight of the picture is an extended chase scene that’s fairly exciting—Rane climbs onto Duke’s trailer, which is full of cars, and detaches the cars to use them as projectiles. Then, after Duke gets taken out of commission, Rane declares revenge, leading to a major standoff.

          Nothing in High-Ballin’ will tax your intelligence, but even if the overall concept is trite, the scene-to-scene energy of the movie is moderately engaging. Fonda’s got a great laid-back rapport with Reed, and the love scenes between Fonda and Shaver play up his everydude charm and her take-no-guff brand of sexiness. The picture drags in the middle, big-time, with too many chatty vignettes between action scenes, and colorful supporting players including Clint Howard and Michael Ironside are underused. (Plus, despite some online listings to the contrary, Joe Don Baker isn’t in the movie—more’s the pity.) It should also be noted that the movie is quite tame in terms of language, sex, and violence, which could be interpreted as a strength or a weakness; viewed favorably, the picture exercises restraint, but viewed unfavorably, the flick is toothless. Either way, this is undemanding cinema that provides intermittent entertainment.

High-Ballin’: FUNKY

Race With the Devil (1975)

With its enjoyably ludicrous premise and its tasty combination of leading players, Race With the Devil should be a winner—I mean, come on, it’s a drive-in thriller starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as a couple of everydudes who witness a murder committed by Satanists, escape in their Winnebago, and suffer through a frightening chase across the Lone Star state. What’s not to like? Well, there’s a whole lot of dead space between the kicky opening act and the wild finale, and the middle of the movie is surprisingly turgid. Director Jack Starrett, whose career started with a couple of lively biker movies, had a bad habit of landing on projects with wobbly scripts—just like Race With the Devil, his movies Cleopatra Jones (1973), The Gravy Train (1974), and A Small Town in Texas (1976) sound great in concept, but end up being tough sits in reality. Part of the problem, obviously, is that Starrett concentrates on generating pulpy sensations instead of building credible characters. Individual scenes in his ’70s movies are exciting, but there’s very little emotional momentum to keep people watching during quiet sequences. Which brings up a major issue with this particular picture—just how many quiet sequences does a movie called Race With the Devil actually need? During the picture’s spongy middle stretch, Fonda and Oates sit around and chat a whole lot. They also fall into the classic Satanist-movie trap—relying on third parties who turn out to be in cahoots with the devil worshippers. Still, Fonda and Oates share an easy chemistry, so some scenes are mildly pleasurable just for the fun of watching two interesting personalities share the same space. The supporting cast isn’t of much note, with Loretta Swit of M*A*S*Hfame and the lovely Lara Parker playing the heroes’ wives—both actresses do a lot of screaming—and reliable screen heavy R.G. Armstrong snarling his way through a trite role as a redneck sheriff. Considering how sluggish this movie gets, there’s some irony to the tagline in the flick’s whiz-bang trailer: “When you race with the devil, you’d better be faster than hell!” Had the filmmakers heeded that advice, Race With the Devilcould have realized its considerable potential.

Race With the Devil: FUNKY

Idaho Transfer (1973)

          If you didn’t know that Peter Fonda once directed a sci-fi movie, you’re not alone, because Idaho Transfer is among the most obscure items in his filmography. Released to little fanfare in 1973 and subsequently relegated to the public-domain slag heap—most available prints of the movie are cruddy second-generation copies—the movie is little more than a footnote to the Easy Rider star’s career. And while it’s true that Idaho Transfer is not the sort of movie that generates much excitement on the part of the viewer, seeing as how the film is leisurely and meditative, the picture has some meritorious elements.
          The story revolves around Karen (Kelly Bohanon), a mixed-up young woman who joins her older sister, Isa (Caroline Hildebrand), at a remote research facility run by the girls’ father, George (Ted D’Arms). George has created time-travel technology and determined that the Earth is racing toward an ecological disaster, so he’s “transferring” young people back and forth to the future. In the future, the young people are laying the foundations for a settlement that can rebuild the human race after the apocalypse. Screenwriter Thomas Matthiesen adds all sorts of inventive flourishes to this wild premise; for instance, the notion that 20th-century environmental damage is destroying the kidneys of mature adults explains why persons past the age of 25 can’t participate in the time-travel experiment. Matthiesen also flips the story on its head partway through, when several young characters get trapped in the future and must fight for survival in a realm plagued by zombie-like radiation victims.
         Although this might sound like the setup for an action story, Fonda presents Idaho Transfer as a lyrical parable. Spotlighting inexperienced amateur actors and striving for a naturalistic feel, Fonda uses a supremely restrained approach—most scenes involve characters casually discussing their extraordinary circumstances. (Composer Bruce Langhorne’s plaintive score accentuates the unimaginable tragedy of outliving one’s own species.) This laid-back approach to sci-fi doesn’t really work, per se, since the movie could have used a lot more adrenaline, but Idaho Transferis an interesting counterpoint to the overwrought melodrama found in most movies exploring similar subject matter. After all, wouldn’t wandering mostly uninhabited wastelands be a quiet existence? Fonda’s cast generally underwhelms, though Bohanon seems comfortable onscreen and Keith Carradine pops up for a couple of scenes as a minor character. It’s easy to admire what Fonda set out to accomplish, and every so often his cerebral/spiritual take on the sci-fi genre connects in a moment of sad poetry.

Idaho Transfer: FUNKY

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

          While not actually a good movie in terms of artistic achievement and/or narrative ambition, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is in some perverse ways the epitome of its genre. Throughout the ’70s, filmmakers made innumerable ennui-drenched flicks about young people hitting the road for crime sprees that represented a sort of anti-Establishment activism. In the best such pictures, the wandering youths articulated their angst so well that their actions felt meaningful; in the worst such pictures, the basic premise was simply an excuse for exploitative thrills. Since Dirty Mary Crazy Larry exists somewhere between these extremes, it’s emblematic of the whole early-’70s road-movie headspace. The picture also has just enough cleverness, reflected in flavorful dialogue and oblique camera angles, to validate the existence of genuine thematic material, even in the context of a trashy lovers-on-the-run picture.

          Peter Fonda stars as Larry, an iconoclastic driver pulling crimes to earn money for a new racecar. Riding shotgun during Larry’s adventure is Deke (Adam Roarke), an accomplice/mechanic. During the movie’s exciting opening sequence, Deke breaks into the home of a grocery-store manager (Roddy McDowall) and holds the man’s family hostage while Larry waltzes into the store to collect the contents of the store’s safe. Unfortunately, Larry’s most recent one-night stand, Mary (Susan George), tracks Larry down during his getaway—she steals his keys and threatens to tell the cops what he’s doing unless she lets him tag along. Thus, Deke, Larry, and Mary form an unlikely trio zooming across the Southwest with police in hot pursuit. Working from a novel by Richard Unekis, director John Hough and his assorted screenwriters do a fine job of balancing talky interludes with high-speed chase scenes, creating an ominous sense of inevitability about the drama’s impending resolution.

          Still, the characterizations are thin—although the crooks’ main pursuer, Sheriff Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow), is an enjoyably eccentric small-town lawman—and the performances are erratic. Roarke anchors the getaway scenes with a quiet intensity that complements Fonda’s enjoyably cavalier persona. Englishwoman George, however, is a screeching nuisance, presumably impeded by the task of mimicking redneck patois. She’s so annoying, in fact, that it’s easy to laugh when Fonda berates her with this bizarre ultimatum: “So help me, if you try another stunt like that, I’m gonna braid your tits!” Dirty Mary Crazy Larry zooms along as fast as the cars featured onscreen, delivering several nerve-jangling crash scenes and generally setting an interesting trap for the reckless protagonists. Yet the movie’s ending changes everything, and the finale is so quintessentially ’70s that it’s reason enough to check out this hard-charging romp.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: GROOVY