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The body politic, its hunted conscience and swollen visage. Small-town Texas ("It's dull, but it's nice") as barometer of American horrors, with every ugly detail multiplied and magnified for an appropriately monstrous snapshot. The hamlet is bored, venal, trigger-happy and bigoted, the childhood haven is dilapidated and the farmland is punctured by oil wells. Crisscrossing ménages inform the composition, the gala soiree of the local baron (E.G. Marshall) plus the party of the meek clerk (Robert Duvall) and his mocking wife (Janice Rule) plus the pop shindig of the mindless young. "I guess you are the sexual revolution all by yourselves!" The golden troublemaker turned escaped convict (Robert Redford) meanwhile wades through the swamps, his wife (Jane Fonda) has been seeing the melancholy scion (James Fox). Desperate mother (Miriam Hopkins), malevolent windbag (Henry Hull), withered Old Hollywood faces complete with views of Grady Sutton and Eduardo Ciannelli. The sheriff (Marlon Brando) tries to keep a lid on the communal caldron and gets pummeled for his trouble, "damn fine way to spend a Saturday night." A grand perversion of Peyton Place, an exhaustive expression of the infernal state of mind in the wake of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, a revision of The Left Handed Gun by Arthur Penn himself. (High Noon also figures in the corroded Western element.) Modernist frenzies in creaky sets, plenty of Antonioni and New Wave to go around. A junkyard all lit up pulls the strands together with eager vigilantes amid twisted metal and burning tires, one of Penn's most virtuosic sequences. Lang's Fury, Sirk's Written on the Wind... And then "it all disappears with a Sunday-morning hangover." Consequences are felt in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here and Nashville. With Angie Dickinson, Richard Bradford, Martha Hyer, Diana Hyland, Jocelyn Brando, Clifton James, Steve Ihnat, Joel Fluellen, and Bruce Cabot.
--- Fernando F. Croce |