the chase

I know I just said that I couldn't spend much time blogging about movies right now, but I can't let last night's gem pass without comment. My friend Doug (last name omitted so his old college chums won't be able to hunt him down) recently had a birthday, and the word was out that one way he wanted to celebrate was with BBQ, donuts, and bad movies. So we had him and Jillian over last night ... Jillian brought the donuts, we all ate Everett and Jones, and I supplied the bad movie: The Chase.

I'm not sure I can do justice to The Chase in a review, so I'll just list a bunch of comments and anecdotes, which should give you a feel for the film. Where to start? I saw it on its release in 1966 and never forgot it. I've seen it several times over the years, but not for a long time until its recent release on DVD, which prompted last night's showing.

If I gave you the basic facts, you'd tell yourself it sounded like a classic, and wonder why you hadn't heard of it. The director was Arthur Penn, whose next two films (Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant) would win him Best Director Oscar nominations. The film was based on a novel and play by Horton Foote, who won two Oscars and two Emmys for his writing. The screenplay was credited to Lillian Hellman. The producer was Sam Spiegel, who had won Best Picture Oscars for three of the last five films he'd produced (On the Waterfront, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia). Heading the enormous cast was Marlon "Greatest Actor of All Time" Brando. Also in the cast were Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Angie Dickinson, Robert Duvall, James Fox, and even Paul Williams, the guy who wrote all those Carpenters' songs.

How could such a movie go wrong? And I haven't even mentioned the endlessly quotable dialogue, like my favorite, when Brando's Sheriff Calder shows up at a party being given by Janice Rule as Emily, (one of) the town slut(s). Surrounded by a bunch of male party attendees, Rule asks Calder to stick around for the party. "All you need to come to my party," she says, "is a pistol, and you've got one." "Well," is Brando's immortal reply, "with all the pistols you got there, Emily, I don't believe there's room for mine."

Perhaps that quote gets at the guilty-pleasure nature of The Chase, for I realize the above isn't great dialogue as much as it's camp dialogue. Suffice to say that the movie doesn't always work. Take the title, for instance: there's precious little chasing going on. Most of the movie is talk talk talk, as a bunch of drunk racist Texans party on a Saturday night. The action, such as it is, comes mostly in those party sequences, where middle-aged likkered-up Texans say stuff like "let's do the Jerk!" and then proceed to do it right there on the screen. (Meanwhile, Paul Williams, who was 26 years old at the time, plays a wild teenager with a penchant for trouble.) The highlight, as is often the case in a Marlon Brando movie, is the scene where Brando gets the shit beat out of him.

Critical commentary is all over the map, often focusing on reputed production difficulties. (Arthur Penn and Lillian Hellman, at the least, have apparently disowned the film. Hellman said "it is far more painful to have your work mauled about and slicked up than to see it go in a wastebasket.") Kael described it as "Our vines have no grapes left in this hellhole of wife swapping, nigger hating, and nigger-lover hating, where people are motivated by dirty sex or big money, and you can tell which as soon as they say their first lines. Why, even the kids are rotten: they dance." David Thomson thinks it's one of Penn's best films, and thinks it compares well to Spiegel's more prestigious productions: "The Chase will last; Lawrence and Kwai only prove the misplaced faith of respectable taste." The TV Guide review, on the other hand, gives the movie one star out of five: "a terrible disappointment, a jumbled, disjointed film directed feebly by Penn ... without purpose or basic interest ... Redford was so little used that he had to introduce himself to fellow cast members every time he set foot on the set." IMDB votes give it 6.9 out of 10, but 11.6% give it a 10, while another 13.3% give it a 5 or less, and six people give it a 1.

Even at our house, the reactions were mixed. Birthday Doug kept falling asleep, Jillian said afterwards that my pre-show comments led her to expect something on the level of Airplane, I expressed pleasure at everything Brando did in the film, and Robin contented herself with making fun of the way Brando says "Bubber."

The film's potential for audience rabble rousing is perhaps best explained by Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, in his review:

I saw it first with a group of mostly black Air Force airmen, who were on their feet shouting for Brando to start killing people. The Chase also played well to the radicals at the UCLA film school. A hot-headed Ethiopian exchange student (who hated 'the man' and liked to brandish an unloaded gun in the film department's tech office) identified with the Sheriff Calder character as a righteous loner who "should have killed 'em all."

Me, I'd call it a guilty pleasure if I believe in such things. It's not much of a movie, it really doesn't deserve to be rediscovered as a lost classic, but I love it. Six on a scale of ten.