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After a canoe ride through the Arkansas bayou, which depicts a murder while offering a great variety of sunlight gradations consumed by swamp water, Joseph Sargent gets down to business. The dead man's brother (Burt Reynolds) receives the news in a prison colony, the crooked sheriff (Ned Beatty) is the culprit, vengeance suits the undercover hillbilly in moonshine country. A mission "like a bunch of old hens scratching a manure pile for sunflower seeds," vibrantly shot through a tangy milieu and the star's scalawag grin. Steven Spielberg was the original director (his pre-production studies can be detected in The Sugarland Express), but Sargent is no replacement hack: Filming on location is its own art, and his use of life-worn material (a hooch distillery next to a pigsty, hymns emanating from a church at dusk) is on par with Altman's in Thieves Like Us. The rapid editing of the car chases (the hero tears through tall grass, circles a locomotive, and races off a dock to land on a departing barge) harmonizes with a Renoirian feeling for deep-focus nature—the camera pans with the nervous grease monkey (Matt Clark) as he scuttles around his garage with shotgun in hand and finds children playing outside the window, later on the backwoods damsel (Jennifer Billingsley) cooks breakfast in a kitchen-porch surrounded by verdure while Reynolds is spotted in the distance swimming in a pond. "Two ways you can do it, hard or easy." Bo Hopkins, Louise Latham and R.G. Armstrong are vividly keyed to the snapshot of a sweltering, not quite integrated, hippie-hating New South, where the One-Eyed Jacks convalescence takes at a home for young unwed mothers. Hal Needham takes it from there. With Diane Ladd, Conlan Carter, Dabbs Greer, Lincoln Demyan, and John Steadman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |