Race With The Devil(Jack Starrett, 1975)

Having inadvertently formalised the concept of “70s Backwoods Satanist Movies Inexplicably Featuring Great, Sam Peckinpah-Affiliated Actors” (or 70sBSMIFGSPAA, if you will) in my Borgnine obit post last week, I thought the least I could do was undertake perhaps the first ever deliberate overview of this much overlooked sub-genre, beginning with what is probably its commercial and creative high water mark, 1975’s ‘Race With The Devil’.

Before we begin, I’d suggest having a good look at the UK quad poster art reproduced above. Imagine walking past a cinema and seeing THAT outside!* I’m sure we can all agree that there would be no possible option but to go in and buy a ticket immediately. Clear the diary, family commitments be damned – I am going to see this movie in which Peter Fonda and Warren Oates fight hooded Satanists with shotguns and drive a tooled up camper van off an exploding bridge, and I am going to see it now.

Such is the kind of reaction ‘70s exploitation distributors seem to have been banking on through much of the decade, and so my feeling of having been born several decades too late increases. I mean, fuck Batman, y'know? I know where my hypothetical dollar is going. Not that ‘Race With the Devil’ is exactly an exploitation film in the strictest sense guess, being bankrolled and distributed by 20th Century Fox… but, well, I’ve always been a little confused as to what precisely it is, to be honest. On the one hand, it’s got a totally stupid horror plotline and a mind-blasting, action-packed poster that would put Roger Corman or Crown International to shame, but at the same time, it’s got big studio money behind it and… Peter Fonda? Warren Oates? I mean, those guys maybe weren't A-grade marquee names in ‘75, but they were still proper actors, y’know? Men who picked their projects carefully and tried to make sure they ended up in quote-unquote good films – that being a very definite distinction back in the pre-Spielberg ‘70s, and one that did not tend to embrace crazy-ass scripts about rampaging Satanists and exploding camper vans.


So what happened? How did they both end up doing this film? Did Fox throw their weight behind producers Wes Bishop and Lee Frost (whose Saber Productions brought us the unforgettable mad scientist/race relations extravaganza The Thing With Two Heads in ’72) before or after the talent was on-board? I have no idea, but I bet there must be a good story behind it.

One thing I do know is that Fonda and Oates were good buddies in real life, so maybe that had something to do with it. The pair played out a close, borderline homoerotic, friendship in Fonda’s excellent directorial debut ‘The Hired Hand’ (which I reviewed here), and as the legend has it they spent much of the early ‘70s palling around off-screen as well, buying land next door to each other in Montana, enjoying a relaxing lifestyle of huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, and no doubt male bonding like crazy.

So with its rural location shooting, rip-roaring action scenes and broadly similar tale of two happy-go-lucky dudes enjoying each other’s company, perhaps the script for ‘Race With The Devil’ simply offered them a fun way to collect a pay cheque whilst continuing to have a good time together (and without requiring them to really knock-one-outta-the-court acting-wise, the way they’d have been expected to do in a ‘serious’ film)..? Pure speculation of course, but who knows. I mean, this was the ‘70s. Maybe they just had Bishop & Frost round for dinner one night, busted out the coke, got talking about this great idea they had for a movie and hey…. y’know how these things go. Before they know it they’re sitting in the camper van, taking direction from biker movie/blaxploitation veteran Jack Starrett, wondering how all this might affect their hopes for an Oscar.


And as to the movie that resulted? Well in spite of the talent and studio backing, Bishop & Frost’s script remains pure boilerplate exploitation, reheating some Satanist paranoia from ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, mixing it up with fresh “rich city folk run into trouble in the country” riffs ala ‘Deliverance’, adding last reel car chase appeal and simmering til lukewarm. With correspondingly bland direction and lesser actors in the lead roles, ‘Race With The Devil’ could easily have been rote schedule filler of the William Girdler / William Grefe variety, but thankfully Starrett steps up to the plate with some surprisingly accomplished filmmaking, and Fonda and Oates can’t help but remain as charismatic as ever, irrespective of their intentions in taking on the project.

With a keen eye on the clock, the movie doesn’t spend a great deal of time on “getting’ to know the characters” type set up, but the stars ease into their roles so naturally it feels like we’ve known them for years. Perhaps drawing on their real life friendship, the dynamic between the two is established with scarcely a word needing to be uttered: Pete is the young(ish) hot-shot pro motorcycle racer, Warren his slightly older, crankier mechanic/garage owner buddy, and all is right with the world.

Oates is boastful and belligerent (bringing back a touch of his character from ‘Two Lane Blacktop’), but also sorta down-at-heel and self-deprecating – he realises he’ll never be as handsome or physically capable as his younger buddy, but that’s damn well not going to stop him trying, bringing his greater wealth and experience into play where necessary. This contest for alpha male status occasionally leads the two to bicker, but they always pull back from a full-scale argument, realising that their friendship is more important than their egos. Isn’t that sweet?


Of course, despite the focus on close male friendship, the film would also like to make clear that there’s nothing funny going on here, ya hear?, and to that end, both men have naturally brought their wives along for the ride. And this sadly is where the movie falls down as a potential character piece or small cast survival drama, simply because neither wife is really ever given the opportunity to develop much of a personality. It’s not that the script paints them as inept or empty-headed or anything, and it’s not the fault of actresses Loretta Swit and Lana Parker, who do a perfectly credible job; it’s just that whilst the men are granted fully fleshed out characters with a believable and interesting relationship, the women remain just.. their wives, sidelined to the extent that by the time we reach the end of the movie it’s still hard to tell them apart – a definitive example of the kind of ‘invisibility’ of married women in babyboomer-era culture that Fonda critiqued so thoughtfully in ‘The Hired Hand’ in fact. Oh well. Can’t exactly blame him for not learning his lesson here I guess, as he’s going to work solely with his ‘actor’ hat on. And like I say, this was the ‘70s. Presumably Swit and Parker’s real life equivalents were busy making sandwiches and rolling joints whilst the boys were yakking up a storm about this crazy movie they were gonna make?


Just as poorly served by the script are the film’s Satanists. Admittedly, the central sacrificial ritual that kick-starts our chase / flight narrative is pretty cool and effectively surprising / violent / chilling (plus I just can’t get over the genre-shredding surreality of seeing Warren Oates in an ill-fitting bobblehat inadvertently stumbling across a black mass – “ooh, they got, uh, some robes, and they’re havin’ themselves a dance..”). Beyond that though, the idea of an omniscient Satanic cult controlling a remote Texas county never quite convinces.

If, as if strongly implied, the cult covertly exercises control over populace and law enforcement within their domain, why do they spend most of the movie playing sneaky ‘cat & mouse’ games with the outsiders who have witnessed their sacrifice, rather than just killing them at the first opportunity? I mean, what’s their game-plan here? Do they think that if they just *scare* these people enough, they won’t bother to mention all the sinister goings-on to anyone once they’re safely over the county line? And also, if the cult exerts such omniscient power in a community of well-fed rednecks and ‘regular folk’ (presumably encompassing local officials, politicians, business leaders etc), how come their big ritual gathering is just some threadbare get together on a bare hillside, attended by a few scrawny hippie types?

Going further, we could also ask why the clerk in an apparently Satanist-affiliated gas station happily sells our heroes a shotgun and ammunition whilst they’re on the run, but… such are the questions you’ve got to contend with when you let the guys who came up with ‘The Thing With Two Heads’ write your script, I suppose.



I guess there probably wasn’t much Jack Starrett could have done to patch up weaknesses in the writing (not really your bag when yr a hired director and your producers wrote the script), but thankfully his work here is solid throughout, keeping things tense and well paced, with imaginative mise en scene, plenty of camera movement, tight cutting, bright colours and effective night shooting, plus lots of incidental local colour and period charm - everything you could ask of a no nonsense bit of commercial cinema really. Along with the quality lead performances, it’s this technical professionalism and directorial suss that goes furthest in helping ‘Race With The Devil’ live up to its unique concept, somewhat transcending its origins as a drive-in timewaster in spite of the script’s inconsistencies.

One element I thought worked really well was the ambiguity of the situations our characters encounter in the aftermath of the ritual. In particular, the scenes in which Fonda and Oates report what they’ve seen to the local sheriff are excellently played. Clearly something is awry with the cops’ flippant attitude and shoddy procedures, but to what extent are they implicated? Are they fully paid up cultists, are they just following the orders of some local bigwig who’s told them to keep clear, or are they simply lazy and inept? Even by the end of the film, we’re not quite sure.** A lot of horror stories tend to overplay their hand when it comes to stuff like this, throwing in some obvious giveaway (Lovecraft did so in just about everything he ever wrote, much as I love him), so to encounter a tale where it’s genuinely difficult to judge the trustworthiness of characters or surroundings is refreshingly unnerving.

As paranoia grows, the uncertainty that results from a mixture of incidents that could maybe, possibly be imaginary (broken phone lines in gas stations, creepy, starin’ locals) and threatening intrusions that are clearly NOT imaginary (snake in the cupboard, murdered pet dog) is well-managed, creating a sense of ever-present threat that would have been immediately dissipated if they’d filled the movie with hooded cultists running around at all hours and dudes with highly suspicious pentagram necklaces and so on.



All such subtleties are out of the window as we approach the high octane conclusion however, and, uh, yeah – the whole car chase sequence is pretty nifty, rip-roaring pre-‘Road Warrior’ fare, delivering on the posters’ promise of some wonderfully gratuitous vehicular destruction. This is the part of the movie that could really have been improved by having some red-robed cultists leaping about the place, but still… I ain’t complaining. Rednecks will do just fine. The ending that follows is a little abrupt - I could easily have gone for another fifteen minutes or so of wanton Satanist bashing – but then, I guess it’s meant to be surprising and abrupt, so, mission accomplished.

In conclusion, ‘Race With the Devil’ might not quite be the heavenly Peter Fonda / Warren Oates Satanist-blasting extravaganza of your dreams, but it’s still a lot of fun, and well worth a look as an example of an unusual, well-made mid ‘70s b-flick. Face it, It’s one of those film you’ve gotta see some time, so might as well grab some beers and get on with it.


*Although it cops out on the Satanist angle, this better known American poster for the movie is perhaps even cooler, and this alternate horror-themed effort is great too.

**Actually that’s not quite true – rewatching the movie to get some screengrabs, I noticed that there’s a brief shot of the sheriff amongst the cultists who surround the motorhome at the finale… but my point still stands I think.

Short Reviews # 3: Other Stuff

Smithereens
(Susan Seidelman, 1982)

Back when I started this blog you probably wouldn’t have put good odds on my praising a movie by one of the creators of the ‘Sex & The City’ franchise, but here we all are to witness me reporting that Susan Seidelman’s independently financed debut ‘Smithereens’ is an absolute blast.

Of the various movies that have leapfrogged their way to ‘cult favourite’ status by capturing the spirit of New York in its magical and volatile late 70s/early 80s prime, ‘Smithereens’, which was shot over a two year period in the East Village, strikes me as one of the most vivid, its low budget and vérité intent giving the film ‘time capsule appeal’ to die for, as Seidelman’s camera tears freely through the streets, apartments, junkyards and nightclubs, largely free of permits or fabrication. It would have been really funny if she’d bumped into Abel Ferrara making ‘Driller Killer’, and they’d ended up in the background of each other’s movies. I’d like to think it was a near miss.

Anyway, first-time screen actress Susan Berman is bottled dynamite here, doing very little acting one suspects as Wren, a perpetually wired proto-Ghost World girl / New Wave refugee in mini-dress and oversized shades, plastering xeroxes of her face onto every available surface as she tries to find a place for herself in the life of the city – both literally and figuratively – and desperately clinging on to any hint of cool or fame.

Richard Hell presumably didn’t need to search too far for his motivation either, portraying a fading, manipulative sleazeball rock singer in what is easily a career-best performance, and our vague love triangle is completed by Brad Rjin, blank as a slate as an itinerant kid from the Mid-West, sleeping in his VW van in a junkyard en route to wherever life happens to takes him.

If ‘Smithereens’ has one drawback, it’s the rather wishy-washy proto-indie melodrama at the heart of the storyline. Seidelman may have had ‘The 400 Blows’ or ‘Bande A Part’ in mind (fresh from film school, the movie’s style and pacing hits those nouvelle vague buttons dead on), but in truth her aimless, drifting characters and their subdued semi-relationships seem more like a blueprint for the kind of sub-Slackerish solipsism that Hollywood started injecting into it’s rom coms and youth dramas in the mid-‘90s tot try to nab a mythical Gen X audience. I dunno why, but I kept thinking ‘Reality Bites’, and then feeling a bit ill.

But that’s small fry really – the strength of the lead performances, and the more genuine desperation that overtakes Berman’s character as the film progresses, keeps us on-message, and what really matters here is that, like its ‘60s inspirations, ‘Smithereens’ is a movie practically exploding with life, every scene dragging us through strange places full of singular people, bright colours and unexpected outbursts of energy and human connection, the camera rushing to keep up with the antics of a charismatic heroine who never hits the ‘OFF’ switch.

The soundtrack is killer too, much of it provided by Glenn Mercer and Bill Million, who formed perennial indie faves The Feelies off the back of the music they initially recorded for this film, and early versions of tracks that went on to form the bulk of their debut album ‘Crazy Rhythms’ sound brilliant here, more fierce and anxious than they ever did on the LP – the perfect accompaniment for watching our frazzled heroine tearing round the chaotic New York streets. Meanwhile, whatever was left of Hell’s Voidoids by the dawn of the ‘80s provide ‘Kid With the Replaceable Head’, one of his best post-Blank Generation tunes, and there’s some great use of ESG’s timeless ‘Moody’ to enjoy too.

There’s so much great incidental stuff in this movie that lives on in the mind after viewing: Rjin sharing a sandwich with a hooker on a cold night, and her king-of-the-junkyard pimp popping up at regular intervals, making increasingly menacing offers to buy his van. Berman desperately trying to muscle into her weak-willed friend’s already woefully over-crowded shared apartment. Hell’s sleazoid punk flatmate trying to put the moves on said weak-willed friend. Just nice little scenes, y’know? Slice of life stuff, but from a way of life that seems strange and special to us now.

Despite its sometimes hokey relationship dramas, there is a raw spirit to ‘Smithreens’ that easily puts it in the top tier of independent American filmmaking from this era. I don’t usually go much on film festival accolades, but it’s no accident that every release of this movie can proudly claim it as “the first American independent film to be selected for Cannes”, and it’s easy to see why Seidelman was on board soon afterwards for Madonna’s ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, in many ways a bigger budget reiteration of the style and themes of this film.

The Jokers
(Michael Winner, 1967)

I don’t know if anyone can help me out here, but: what IS the deal with Michael Winner? I mean, just the way he managed to crank out dozens of films through the ‘60s and ‘70s, working with some of the era’s most renowned actors on expensive studio films that explored a range of potentially interesting subject matter, and yet… they’re pretty much all crap. And I mean, prior to ‘Deathwish’, he never even had a commercial hit, insofar as I can tell. How did he keep on getting the budgets? Why did people want to work with him? Who knows.

I don’t say this because I hold some personal grudge against the man – after all, some of the greatest directors in history were similarly insufferable blowhards - but simply because I’ve yet to see a film by him that hasn’t been a cack-handed disappointment of one kind or another. Case in point: ‘The Jokers’, in which Oliver Reed and Michael Crawford play a pair of indolent aristocratic brothers who devise a fool-proof plan to steal the Crown Jewels and subsequently return them, thus making a mockery of the English establishment and cementing themselves as heroes of the counter-culture and popular press. Zany hi-jinks and tense, Italian Job-style heist capers ensure, set against a backdrop of authentic Swinging London decadence, with screenplay assistance from future sit-com savants Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

What could possibly go wrong? I mean from a start like that my dog could probably make a good movie, and I don’t even have a dog. And yet, Winner somehow manages to turn in a picture that is singularly unlovable. It’s not *awful* as such – Reed and Crawford are reliably brilliant, as are many of the familiar faces in the supporting cast, and there’s enough going on to make for pleasantly diverting viewing if you happened to catch it on TV on a rainy afternoon, but each opportunity to turn the film into the madcap pop art masterpiece it truly should be is shamefully bungled.

Winner’s directorial style here is ugly and rather lumpen, favouring awkwardly framed close-ups and jerky jump cuts over wider, more visually inviting compositions, whilst the kind of local colour and random magnificence that usually livens up even second rate films shot in ‘60s London is singularly lacking amid a succession of drab interiors and party scenes that look like suburban wedding receptions. The city location shooting is pretty good, with chaotic crowd scenes are quite convincingly orchestrated, but even here… London just looks like London, y’know?

Simple though the film’s story is, the plot ends up tripping over itself, slowing down the final act as characters rehash the same details and arguments again and again to no very satisfactory conclusion. There are a few good lines and capers reminiscent of Clement & La Frenais’ better TV work, but if the best thing you can say about a feature film is that bits of it might pass muster in an episode of ‘The Likely Lads’, well… I’ve leave you to finish that sentence.

Worst of all though is that rather than offering any critique of his privileged, self-satisfied and generally dislikeable protagonists, Winner seems to invite us to identify with them as loveable rogues – a disjuncture that can’t help but invite comparison to the director’s own boorish public persona. In fact, the whole film seems to have a particularly nasty strain of low key misogyny running through it, as most obviously expressed in the character of Reed’s Swedish girlfriend, whose lack of English vocabulary is seen to render her a childish simpleton, as the brothers forcibly exclude her from their conversations whilst we in the audience are invited to roll our eyes at her ‘idiotic’ pronouncements. Englishmen in ‘60s movies – and in ‘60s real life I daresay - could get away with a lot of bad behaviour if they had a bit of charm and charisma, but Winner and co seem to have forgotten that latter half of the equation here, giving us a pair of heroes who just seem like conceited oafs waiting for a fall that never comes.

I’m probably exaggerating the negative aspects of the film somewhat – it’s honestly not that bad – it has some good set-piece scenes and is passably entertaining on a basic lizard-brain level. If it’s ever on TV during that aforementioned rainy afternoon it’s probably worth a shot, but like most of Winner’s films, it could have been so much more.

The Hired Hand
(Peter Fonda, 1971)

It’s been over six months since I saw this Peter Fonda directed western at a BFI Flipside screening, and whilst it’s not exactly a ‘drop everything’ life-changer, I still regularly find myself reflecting on how much I liked it.

Beginning as an archetypal ‘hippie western’, it doesn’t take much effort to project a post-Easy Rider resonance onto the tale of Fonda, his best buddy Warren Oates, and a more impetuous younger companion slowly cruising around the American wilderness, idly dreaming of one day making it to California. From the outset, Fonda proves a far more accomplished director than anyone might have expected, exhibiting an almost Terrence Malick-like sense of scope and meditative detail, greatly aided by Vilmos Zsigmond.’s photography, which is so beautiful here it almost brings tears to the eyes, particularly in a stunning psychedelic sequence of swirling, superimposed, sun-drenched landscape shots. Pretty far-out, but striking and unexpected enough to avoid seeming like a goofy period cliché, whilst Bruce Langhorne’s extraordinary soundtrack of droning, Sandy Bull-esque guitar provides a perfect an accompaniment to the visuals, prefiguring both Neil Young’s ‘Dead Man’ score and the expansive rural minimalism of the late Jack Rose’s playing in his group Pelt. Too much, man!

Things take a rather different turn though after Fonda and Oates’ young friend is murdered during a bad night in an unfriendly frontier outpost, prompting Fonda to decide he should face up to his responsibilities and return to the homestead he abandoned seven years ago to go a-wonderin’. The look of anger and resignation in the eyes of his wife (Verna Bloom), contrasted with sight of free-spirited Oates saddling up his horse to head off into the sunset, tells us everything we need to know about the bind this swiftly aging young man finds himself in.

Given that Fonda made this film at the same time that he and his New Hollywood contemporaries were living lives of unparalleled freedom and alpha-male excess, stroking their egos with monstrous works of creative craziness, I was surprised and rather impressed by ‘The Hired Hand’s formal restraint and concentration on simple human drama, and even more so by the way that it sees Fonda offering a persuasive critique of his lifestyle as a Hollywood-hippie playboy, consciously exploring the issues of personal responsibility often faced by men of his age and, generally, coming up with the right answers.

One of the things that is most remarkable about ‘The Hired Hand’ is its frankness in addressing the relationship between Fonda and Oates. Considering that Bloom is the female lead in what is still ostensibly a Hollywood film, her character is portrayed as a surprisingly unattractive figure, whilst the camera’s ‘gaze’ lingers a lot more persuasively on the male leads. As Fonda and Oates swagger around in their fashionably threadbare jeans n’ spurs looking like they’re out for a night picking up chicks at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, Bloom wears the drab, shapeless garments of a genuine agricultural homesteader, her face drawn and prematurely aged, looking like she actually has spent seven years performing back-breaking labours as a single parent in the unforgiving Texas sun. Far from a caricature of a needy/victimised wife though, her character is gifted with a sharp emotional intelligence, and wastes no time in clocking the relationship between the two men, asking her ‘husband’ (if indeed he is able to regain that title after so long in the wilderness) in no uncertain terms whether he wouldn’t be happier sharing a sleeping bag with Warren under the stars than spending the night in her bed.

With the elephant in the room thus revealed, a violent revenge plot emerges from outside to force a conclusion to the three characters’ emotional stand-off, and the film essentially becomes a platonic love story between the two men, with Bloom playing Jules to Oates’ Jim, so to speak. In fact, the shadow of Truffaut’s masterpiece hangs heavy over ‘The Hired Hand’, sharing its deeply rooted humanism and unconventionally honest approach to human relationships, as well as its slow-building sense of tragedy.

Oh, and there’s also some cool stuff with people getting shot and guys riding horses and such, in case you were wondering.

A very good film indeed in my estimation, I think wider recognition and a new audience for ‘The Hired Hand’ would be richly deserved. (Tartan did a big 2-disc DVD release a few years back that you can now get dirt cheap, incidentally.) I certainly won’t be thinking of Peter Fonda as just a pretty face from now on, that’s for sure.