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The dust-specked prologue posits Steinbeck as the pilgrimage's foundation, the Everly Brothers ("All I Have to Do Is Dream") herald watercolor-hued Depression icons. Suddenly it's 1958 in California, the whirlwind of kitsch (Cloris Leachman in her low-cut, tiger-striped numbers and stretch pants, Ann Sothern sloshing every sentence with a purr, Jim Backus in fez and polyester) already in progress, everybody saltando. Elsewhere, the baby of the clan (Linda Purl) ping-pongs between an earnest surfer (Donny Most) and a sexy greaser (Bryan Englund) until they all end up in bed, no big deal. Jonathan Demme is funny like that, he crams three generations of female hell-raisers ("true desperados") into a black convertible and shoots their trip from Long Beach to Jerusalem, Arkansas, like a salty burlesque of Corman's Ma Parker cheapies. Along for the ride is an amiably slumming cowboy sheriff (Stuart Whitman) and a retirement-home runaway (Merie Earle) who takes up smoking cigars. "What's the point of being an outlaw if you look like an in-law?" Banks are their targets, or would be if Leachman's flustered gangland matriarch didn't halt everything mid-robbery to tend to the clerk crying in the corner. Patriotic bromides between slot-machines, the neon crosses and canned organ chimes of wedding chapels, the ancient rocky desert that gives way to teepee-shaped bungalows amid palm trees: The lay of the land, God's country and all that "hummingbird doo-doo." Demme's fond and furious upending of Eisenhower mores, America on the cusp of the restless Sixties told from the vantage point of a brassy Seventies drive-in quickie, and pure exhilaration. Lichtenstein's dollar bill figures in the closing freeze-frame as a sort of transfigured punchline. With Sally Kirkland, Clint Kimbrough, Harry Northup, Dick Miller, Carmen Argenziano, and Tisha Sterling.
--- Fernando F. Croce |