THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
HARKENING TO ARKIN THE SCREEN Apparently the guy in the driver's seat gets top billing. In Freebie and the Bean it is James Caan who always drives the patrol car, so the character he plays comes...
...That's his nature, his character, and it doesn't vary much from picture to picture no matter what the role is...
...Truth to tell, though, it makes no difference as far as Arkin is concerned...
...It is once again the world of Yossarian in Catch-22, except that this comedy is more down-beat than that one...
...That Arkin is shot for his trouble in one of those contretemps and walks away from the other unscathed hardly seems to matter...
...Like the man and woman outside the barbershop, the old couple seems used to such things...
...At bottom this is a world of random victimization, a world in which such victimization has become a way of life, the order—or rather, disorder—of the day...
...They behave as if such assaults were as commonplace for them as sniper attacks were for the characters in Little Murders, where Arkin made a whole career of unsuccessfully investigating random violence...
...In Freebie and the Bean it is James Caan who always drives the patrol car, so the character he plays comes first in the film's title, and his partner, played by Alan Arkin, is second...
...Cut to the chase" used to mean cut to some deserted area where the hero and the villain could go it alone, flat out...
...These girl's kidnapping of him is obviously the first thing that has given his life any meaning since he retired as a "lifer" from the Marine Corps...
...In effect, the culprit gets lost in the crowd and the point of the chase becomes not to catch him, but just to clear the by-standers out of the way...
...Nothing mass-produces innocent bystanders, random victims, more readily than a movie chase, and Rush takes the fullest possible advantage of this...
...In Freebie and the Bean everyone is just an innocent bystander like that couple outside the barber shop, and that includes the Bean too...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Remarkably, their reaction to Freebie and Bean's attack is almost ferocious and effective enough to be professional anyhow...
...His car is a rolling safety hazard with its muffler leaking, its doors wired shut, etc...
...In Freebie and the Bean people seem no less accustomed to unprovoked, unexpected assaults...
...Or rather, the character may vary, but the situation in which he finds himself, the world in which he lives, doesn't...
...At one point Freebie and Bean's patrol car careens through the wall of a building into the bedroom of an old couple who haven't even been aware a chase was in progress...
...The Bean is in truth almost as innocent a victim of Freebie's reckless driving as the old couple because, as I said, he's only along for the ride...
...To protect the racketeer for themselves they stake out the barber shop where he's getting a haircut, and when a car with Michigan plates pulls up, having been tipped off the hit man is from Detroit, Freebie and Bean jump the driver along with a female accomplice waiting on the sidewalk...
...It's with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, of course...
...In Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, what sort of world this is is established as soon as the credits are over...
...His never was a world in which such subtle distinctions seemed to count for much anyway...
...While Freebie uses their phone to call in, they just go on eating the snack which his arrival interrupted...
...But nowadays the chase almost always occurs in a heavily congested urban location where the maximum possible number of human obstacles can get in the way...
...At one point in this film, for instance, the two policemen know that a hit man is to make an attempt on the life of a racketeer whom they are trying to obtain an indictment against...
...In Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins he ends up in the middle, as usual, with one of the twins on one side brandishing a gun and a cop on the other side...
...That car's coming to rest at the foot of the old couple's bed is an image of the total vulnerability of us all...
...But the action itself is pretty much the same...
...Like all movie conventions, a chase scene has to work on a very visceral level as a metaphor, a fantasy, for the frustrations the audience feels in real life...
...That's why he always stays the same no matter what he does...
...More extraordinary, however, is that when Rafferty escapes from their clutches, he can't stand his recovered liberty...
...Predictably, these people turn out to be unsuspecting tourists, not hired assassins...
...On his lunch break in a park, Rafferty retrieves a frisbee for some girls who then return the courtesy by kidnapping him at gunpoint...
...Leaving the house to drive to work in the morning, Rafferty reveals himself to be the world's worst driver...
...Whether he's doing the driving or not, he's still just coming along for the ride...
...How little difference it makes which side of the equation Arkin starts out on is shown by the fact that he ends up in exactly the same predicament in both of these films...
...Unlike Yossarian, Rafferty rolls with the punch and moves with the action as best he can...
...It all goes to show how completely absorbed in victimhood Rafferty is—how completely unable to do without victimization...
...But he has allowed himself to cross that line before—most notably in Wait Until Dark—perhaps because it's a line that so often proves nebulous in his films...
...Director Richard Rush has used his scenario as a pretext for so many extravagant chase scenes that we spend as much time driving here as with Rafferty...
...It seems that in this society John Doe has had so much experience as the random victim, he's developed a real instinct for it...
...And what is the job to which he is driving...
...The wreck leaves the same expression on his face that is on theirs, an expression uncertainly that of someone either being calm in the face of disaster or else going into shock...
...It's true that Arkin here plays the attacker rather than, as with Rafferty, the one attacked...
...Arkin does all the driving this time so his character comes .first, and the co-stars, Sally Kellerman and Mackenzie Phillips, are second...
...In Freebie and the Bean the end comes when Bean moves in to arrest that racketeer and unknowingly becomes an interloper, an innocent bystander, in a stickup...
...Rafferty gives driving tests to license applicants...
...He rams into a parked motorcycle, bounces over the curb, runs a stop sign, turns from the wrong lane without signaling, and is on his way...
...As soon as he is clear of them, he turns right around and drives back to find them again, so they can all continue the cross-country junket the girls had been forcing him to take them on...
...In the world in which an Arkin character lives, one always rises to his highest level of incapacity...
...In Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, it's the other way round...
...Although the whole film takes place in one city, it is really as much a road picture as Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins...
Vol. 101 • March 1975 • No. 16
