Three Films Make A Post: Get a Lift

Harry and Tonto (1974): Having lost his home to city development, and not really jibing with living with his son and his family, elderly New Yorker Harry (Art Carney) and his cat Tonto (Tonto) go on a road trip through the USA, encountering old flames and new experiences, living parts of life Harry never did before. Among other things, for this Paul Mazursky comedy is stuffed full with humanity and human encounters big and small, feelings simple and complicated, treating aging and old age and the loss that comes with it with as much dignity as humour, exhibiting an openness to different ways of seeing the world that seems to be utterly alien to today’s “you’re either for us or against us” world.

Mazursky creates (or sees) an America made out of very different people believing very different things that still express a shared humanity, never making a grand gesture out of this, but treating his characters kindly, even those that might not completely deserve it.

A Man Called Sledge (1970): This is one of two movies directed by actor Vic Morrow, though producer Dino DeLaurentiis apparently robbed him of the final cut, and there may or may not be material included shot by Giorgio Gentili instead. Despite an American cast, director and US money, in feeling and tone, this is a lot like an Italian Western, starting with its treatment of the Southwestern setting, over the “sweat and dirty shirts” production design, and certainly not ending in its pretty cynical view of the world. The film also includes a pretty hefty heist movie element and ends up as a Treasure of the Sierra Madre variation.

It features James Garner in one of his grimmer performances as the titular gunman Sledge, and moves through its set pieces of dust and mud with a degree of vigour. It never quite manages to reach the allegorical heft the director – at least going by the final act – clearly wants it to have, but then, I dislike allegories anyway. In the state it is in, it’s a solid enough movie, not as well directed as the best Italian westerns (nor as crazy as these can get) but entertaining enough for what it is.

Jiu Jitsu (2020): On the plot level, this thing directed by Dimitri Logothethis is a completely bizarre attempt to mix martial arts movie traditions with a Predator rip-off, plus the dreaded amnesiac protagonist (Alain Moussi is our hero, such as he is) syndrome. And Nicolas Cage is a crazy jiu jitsu swordsman veteran (jiu jitsu in this film has little to do with the actual martial art, by the way), so you can expect a couple of scenes of Cage flipping out entertainingly, doing his best in martial arts fight scenes against people who are actually good at this sort of thing, and doing an Obi Wan (just louder). Also appearing are action and martial arts film darlings like Tony Jaa and Frank Grillo, but they only get a couple of fights in. Moussi is good in his action sequences but pretty terrible at the whole acting thing. He was probably much cheaper than those members of the cast who can do both; but then, the script is so utterly bad at stringing the decent, sometimes fun, action scenes together, even a great actor might have not gotten through the affair with dignity intact.

Ravagers (1979)

The world has ended again, though it's not quite clear if in a bang or a whimper. Be it as it may, what's left of the world is rather brown and barren. Nothing grows anymore; men and animals have become barren too.

What's left of humanity largely falls into two camps - there are the "flockers", who hide away in remote places, seeking safety in numbers, and then there are the "ravagers", whose hobbies seem to be quite self-explaining.

Our hero of the day, Falk (Richard Harris, laying it on even thicker than usual with him, probably to make up for his character being a total non-entity without a past beyond the one we see being made at the beginning, and without any discernible character traits) does not belong to either of these groups. At the beginning of the movie, he leads a scavenging nomad life with his wife who dreams of better days and things beginning to grow again. They have been lulled into a sense of security by things going rather well for them, and practice some good old-fashioned domesticity. Alas, the couple's happiness is short-lived. A group of ravagers led by a very tenacious man without a name (Anthony James) discovers them, and rapes and kills Falk's wife, while Falk manages to escape.

Falk ferrets out the hiding place of the gang, kills one of their members and then goes a-wandering through the wastelands again. For some reason, the nomad gets a minor entourage, first in form of an old soldier (Art Carney) taking him for his commanding officer. Later, Faina (Ann Turkel), a young woman from one of the flocks gets rather keen on our hero. Falk doesn't exactly want to travel with others, but it's not as if he could stop them. While the trio has not exactly riveting post-apocalyptic adventures, the ravagers follow Falk for no good reason at all wherever he goes, this being the sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland where following people is easy.

Things finally come to a head when Falk and his friends come to a not quite utopian community led by Rann (a wasted Ernest Borgnine) and the more sympathetic Brown (an equally wasted Woody Strode).

See that word "finally" I used in the last sentence? That's Ravagers problem right here. While I don't expect every film - not even my post-apocalyptic adventure movies - to be a fast-paced and exciting from beginning to end, Richard Compton's film puts even my patience to the test with one of the most uneventful post-apocalyptic travelogues I've seen.

The lack of outer events would be less of a problem if the film had anything much to say, but thematically, this neither adds to nor subtracts from the expected of the end of the world. If the film has a thesis, it's "people need hope, and they'll even turn to the most boring man alive - Richard Harris's character - to project it onto". Which would possibly work out better for the movie if Falk ever did anything at all to make everyone else's fixation on him believable. It's possible he is meant as the empty page everyone can project his on ideas onto, but it's not as if the film would do anything to explore that besides looking po-faced and having dramatic music (the only actually dramatic thing on screen, I'm afraid). From time to time, Falk and the ravagers meet again, but Compton does his humanly best to film these run-ins in the least exciting or disturbing way possible; and of course, he never answers the question why the ravager leader is so damn obsessed with Falk, because his actions go far beyond vengeance for a dead gang member.

The film's not a total wash, though. The photography is moody, and does its best to milk some dilapidated buildings and many different shades of brown for the proper post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Even though there isn't anything of interest happening on screen, at least the film looks like a proper non-generic end of the world happened. The other aspect I found well thought out and well done is how differently the body language of many of the film's characters is - the new world after the end has made most people visibly afraid and insecure, remembering how living as animals must have been, and their bodies show it.

It's just unfortunate that there is no story, no thesis, no interesting character to make any use of these flashes of something better in Ravagers. Watching it is like waiting for the actual film to happen. Alas, it never starts.

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