March 1981 continues with an Albert Brooks classic and the end of a horror trilogy
Plus a troubled Tobe Hooper big-studio swing
It causes me such pain to split a weekend in half for this newsletter.
I’m actually starting a push to consolidate back issues into a single page per month. The problem is that the software will only allow me to send emails of a certain length, but on the eventual archival page, I can go as long as I want. So while I break each month’s newsletter into a bunch of bite-size pieces for you when I actually publish, I’m going to start creating an archive page for each month where you will find the entire month on a single page.
I’ve done it for February 1980 and March 1980 so far, and I think it looks much cleaner. Knowing that the end result will all end up on a single page, I think I’m going to be less precious about how I split things up when I’m publishing them at first.
With that in mind, I’m going to break the rest of this month into two installments. Five movies this time, six movies next time. Both installments are worth digging into deeply, though, so let’s jump right in with a film that really should have worked when you look at all of the players involved…
MARCH 13
Back Roads
Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, David Keith, Miriam Colon, Michael V. Gazzo, Dan Shor, M. Emmet Walsh, Barbara Babcock, Nell Carter, Alex Colon, Lee de Broux, Ralph Seymour, Royce D. Applegate, Bruce M. Fischer, John Dennis Johnston, Don “Red” Barry, Billy Jayne, Eric Laneuville, Brian Frishman, Diane Sommerfield, Henry Slate, Mathew Campion, Tony Ganios, Lee McLaughlin, Arthur Pugh, Gerry Okuneff, Louie Nicholas, Cherie Brantley, James Michael Bailey, Jim Bailey, Fred Baldwin, Billy Holliday, Barbara Thompson, Buddy Thompson, Phil Gordon, Mike Barton, Richard Charles Boyle, Sherrie Whitman, Lupita Cornejo, Bob Hannah, David Powledge, Eliott Keener, David Pellette, David Dahlgren, John M. Jackson, John Wilmot, Jack E. Shadix, Leonardo J. Noriega, Joe Ford, Woody Watson, Duke Alexander
cinematography by John A. Alonzo
music by Henry Mancini
screenplay by Gary DeVore
produced by Ronald Shedlo
directed by Martin Ritt
Rated R
1 hr 34 mins
When an out-of-work boxer doesn’t have enough money to pay a prostitute for their time together, they end up on a cross-country road trip.
There are films that should work when you look at all the talent thrown at them, and they just don’t. In cases like that, I feel like I’m writing more of a post-mortem than a review.
Martin Ritt got blindsided by the blacklist just as he was starting to build a career as a director and producer in early television, and he spent the better part of the ‘50s working in theater and teaching acting at the Actor’s Studio. When he returned to film directing, he brought a renewed interest in social drama to his work, building relationships with movie stars who he worked with repeatedly. His most important creative relationship was with Paul Newman, who he directed in films like The Long, Hot Summer and Hud. He almost made First Blood in the mid-‘70s with Paul Newman starring as Rambo opposite a sheriff played by Robert Mitchum, and, yes, I am haunted by the thought of that film. Maybe his most personal film came in 1976 with The Front, a movie about the Hollywood blacklist that reflected his own experience. He followed that up with Norma Rae, a movie about the rise of the labor movement in the ‘70s that earned Sally Field an Oscar. It was a huge critical and commercial success, and I understand why a studio would want to put Ritt and Field back together immediately, especially a brand-new studio like CBS Theatrical Films that wanted to make a noise as they were making their launch.
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