On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen RUSTIC MAYHEM BY ROBERT ASAHINA For a film critic, at least, leaving New York City means entering a foreign country—the rest of the United States. In America's heartlands, even...
...unlike their low-budget predecessors, however, they are independent features expected to turn a profit, not intended for the second half of a double bill...
...Critics often disparingly claim that he merely "plays himself" in his pictures...
...Still, on its own sentimental terms, the film works...
...In the summer of 1967, only a deaf person could have escaped hearing Bobbie Gentry's mournful ballad...
...supposedly sophisticated filmgoers whose tears were jerked by the mechanical contrivances of the Harvard-Radcliffe Love Story have no right to be condescending toward this backwoods romance...
...In America's heartlands, even first-run domestic movies are difficult to find, and continental fare is simply unavailable...
...But why this kind of film should offer so broad a base for an actor like Reynolds to exploit in the first place is a complex question...
...The promotional ads for Walking Tall asked, "When was the last time you stood up and cheered at the end of a movie...
...Bitty Jack and Walking Tall, two of the better known examples, were top grossing films and have been rereleased a second and third time...
...It lacked, in short, a star—someone with the appeal of a Burt Reynolds...
...But their natural audience is clearly not here...
...In the prototypical Bitty Jack and Walking Tall, strong noble individualists who are not afraid to use violence overcome the vice and corruption of the town...
...and the Dixie Dance Kings...
...It is between heroes and antiheroes, between the different attitudes that motivate the creation of each...
...Billy Jack ran on 42nd Street before leaving on its triumphal tour of the nation, and Jackson County Jail, where hapless Yvette Mimieux is raped before escaping the clutches of the evil burg she had innocently strayed to, is currently showing in New York neighborhood theaters...
...As a director, his first hit was Macon County Line, the story of a crazed sheriff gunning down a group of innocent teenagers who are out on a joyride...
...It is undeniable, too, that the former flock to Jackson County Jail, the latter line up for Taxi Driver, and both films picture their settings as despicable and unworthy of human habitation...
...The extremities of the plots provide showcases for performers like Burt Reynolds and Glynnis O'Connor, who are talented—or shrewd...
...Hartley with an affecting warmth that rises above the banalities of the script...
...Of course, rural audiences are every bit as capable of self-hatred as urban ones...
...The movie owes its success in no small part to the director and produer, Max Baer...
...This is a power grounded less in acting skill than in cinematic presence, and he has been especially successful in such small-town pictures as Gator, White Lightning (where Reynolds introduced the character of Gator McKlusky) and W.W...
...Moreover, urban people may be tiring of alienation themselves...
...If there is a cultural civil war going on, it is not between liberals and conservatives, or city and country...
...Like the B movies of the past, they deal with crime, blood and sex...
...That gritty, hard-hitting semi-documentary failed because it was unable to engage the feelings of the audience for its protagonists...
...McCall's gambling, prostitution and drug-dealing network is a perfect embodiment of the organized local evil that is at the center of these films...
...Some of these movies actually play in the Big Apple...
...The song "inspired" the film, and this summer only a deaf person could escape the radio and television saturation campaign proclaiming, "What the song didn't tell you, the movie will show you...
...Benjamin Stein has recently argued that the genre is evidence of a "cultural civil war": The big-city writers and creators of mass culture represent rural America as a hotbed of sin and corruption because of their own convictions...
...I suspect, though, that the reactions of smalltown people in this instance have little to do with the alienation that prompts city dwellers to wallow in self-disgust...
...What the theaters and drive-ins feature are pictures that either never reach Manhattan or quickly disappear when they do...
...Repressed passion, culminating in the climactic suicide, is the key to the plot...
...The titles of these "ozoners" (so called by the industry because of their largely open-air audience) are often bizarre or graphically suggestive: Women in Cages, Crazy Mama, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre...
...It is evidence once more of the superiority of subtle suggestiveness over failed explicitness...
...And if they rarely attract much critical notice, some have nevertheless been enormously successful financially...
...Both song and movie concern a doomed love affair between two teenagers, Billy Joe McAllister (Robby Benson) and Bobby Lee Hartley (Glynnis O'Connor), in rural Tallahatchie County, Mississippi...
...and Mrs...
...Reynolds' likeableness consists precisely in this ability to establish instant recognition and contact with the viewer...
...Benson is much less good, but Sandy McPeak and Joan Hotchkis embody Mr...
...Baer is not a country boy but was one of television's Beverly Hillbillies...
...Gator McKlusky, a rambunctious moonshiner, joins forces with the Department of Justice to clean up a crooked Georgia county run by a vicious political boss, Bama McCall (played by country singer Jerry Reed...
...When cynical Upper East Side patrons of the cinema can be moved—or manipulated—to cheer (especially after having to wait two hours to get in the theater), that should tell you something about what the public is looking for...
...Occasionally, though, the organized evil manages to win out in the end...
...I can't remember the last time I did, but I saw an audience do so at the conclusion of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...
...Nobility is hardly the character trait usually associated with Burt Reynolds, but the character he portrays in Gator is as sympathetic as Bobby Lee Hartley...
...Yet we admire John Wayne or Marlon Brando precisely because each "plays himself" —that is, brings the force of his personality to bear on all of his roles...
...The ozoners represent a peculiarly American cinematic phenomenon, associated with the rise of suburban living, the expanding market of youthful consumers, and the economics of motion picture financing and distribution...
...Ode to Billy Joe," as disc jockeys across the nation played it endlessly...
...the movie comes up with a silly and tasteless motive for his suicide...
...While it is difficult to dislike Reynolds, who also makes his directorial debut with Gator, it is indeed easy to belittle his adolescent and self-conscious posturing, and his rather severe limitations as an actor...
...it waits for them under the night sky somewhere out across the Hudson...
...Most of its failings can be attributed to screenwriter Herman Raucher, who also wrote Summer of '42...
...There are the familiar sexual aberrations: homosexuality, prostitution, illegitimacy...
...It is important to understand all this to appreciate the not inconsiderable virtues of two recent additions to the genre, Ode to Billy Joe and Gator...
...Phenix City, Alabama...
...What the song didn't reveal, you may recall, was exactly why "Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge...
...She is defeated by the rural establishment, yet she preserves her nobility to the end...
...The Tallahatchie Bridge is no more unlikely a locale for a contemporary Romeo and Juliet than is a Laundromat in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...Such a film takes place somewhere in the South, Midwest or Southwest, in a hamlet where ignorance, prejudice and sexual and political repression have bred passions that erupt in brutal and frequently perverse ways...
...It is a mark of Reynolds' shrewdness that he recognizes the nature of his appeal and of his audience...
...Predominantly left-of-center and alienated from the "real" America, these adversary intellectuals are supposedly attacking the countryside for its political and cultural conservatism...
...O'Connor is quite winsomely virginal, even if she has made a career out of playing precisely the same innocent teenager (most recently, in Baby Blue Marine...
...Gator seems to have been inspired by The Phenix City Story (1955), a landmark B movie about real criminal activities in "Sin City, U.S.A...
...The hero of Cuckoo's Nest, a loony, was a hero nonetheless...
...Judging from the re-emergence of the hero in both rural and urban areas, alienation is on the way out and nobility is coming back into style...
...It is looking for heroes...
...Although Ode to Billy Joe has little of the nightmare paranoia of the earlier film, it is very much in the same mold...
...and he was played by Jack Nicholson, an actor with as much cinematic presence as Burt Reynolds...
...And the heroine is as pure and embattled as Billy Jack...
...They represent as well the emergence of a genuinely new and authentic genre —the small-town movie...
...enough to satisfy the hunger for nonintellectual, unalienated, uncynical heroism...
...This analysis, however, ignores the simple fact that the anti-rural films have their largest following in small towns and the suburbs...
...Films like Ode to Billy Joe and Gator give us sympathetic characters in ludicrously grotesque situations (rustic cuckoo's nests), where only nobility and strength can protect them from mayhem or disaster...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 18
