This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of the captivating Spanish family drama Romeria.
CURRENT MOVIES
- The Odyssey: epic filmmaking at its best. In theaters.
- Romeria: when the dots don’t connect right away. In art house theaters, but hard to find.
- I Want Your Sex: good, naughty fun. In theaters.
- The Last Viking: hidden loot amidst the deluded. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
- Maddie’s Secret: a bracingly inventive comic melodrama. In theaters.
ON TV
On August 18, Turner Classic Movies airs a curiosity from 1965, The Chase, which illustrates the truth that talent alone can’t save lousy source material. Directed by the great Arthur Penn, The Chase stars Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall and Angie Dickinson, not to mention Janice Rule, E.G. Marshall, James Fox, Martha Hyer, and from Hollywood’s earlier golden days, Miriam Hopkins and Bruce Cabot. And it stinks.
Brando plays the sheriff in a redneck Texas town stewing about the expected return of a recently escaped convict named BUBBER (Redford). Bubber’s wife (Fonda) is now having an affair with the son (Fox) of the banker who runs the town (Marshall). Before Bubber sneaks back into the town junkyard, everyone drinks, fusses, and commits more adultery. Emily (Rule) openly humiliates her cuckolded hubbie (Duvall). All the while, the minor characters act really racist and conspire to lynch Bubber, who is white.
What I find bizarre is that Arthur Penn was at the height of his powers in 1966. He had already been Oscar-nominated for The Miracle Worker, as he would be for his next movie, the iconic, groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde, to be followed by Alice’s Restaurant (yet another Oscar nod), Little Big Man and Night Moves.
I put the blame on the source material and the casting. Lillian Hellman adapted the screenplay from a Horton Foote play, in turn adapted from a Foote novel. It all seems like a over-wrought Southern melodrama in which everyone speaks like they’re pronouncing Big Daddy’s lines in Cat on a Hot tin Roof.
Brando does what he can with a character who is alienated and keeps getting beaten up. Janice Rule and Angie are especially good. But Redford and Fonda are horribly – and distractingly – miscast as white trash, and we just can’t get past that. Plus there’s a racism thread slapped on to be topical, and it’s so sjallow as to be disrespectful of the real Civil Rights movement.
Here’s a curiosity: The Chase was the second of Paul Williams’ 96 screen acting credits, mostly in fairly silly roles that are entirely divorced from his highly successful career as a composer (six Oscar nominations),
A decade later, no studio could have afforded to make a movie with Brando, Redford, Fonda and Duvall all on the payroll. It may not be good, but The Chase can be fun to watch if you mock the cliches and laugh at the miscasting. And Janice Rule is a force of nature in this film.
Note: many films share the title The Chase, but this is the one made by Arthur Penn in 1966.
