Past Misdeeds: The Last Run (1971)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Former professional getaway driver Harry Garmes (George C. Scott very brilliantly being George C. Scott) had retired to a Portuguese fishing village nearly a decade ago. Shortly after coming to the village he lost his child in an accident, and a bit later his wife to another man, leaving him if not dead inside, then emotionally hibernating for a long time.

Now, Harry seems to have decided that enough is enough with the moping, and takes on the job of helping in the escape of con Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) from a Spanish prison. Harry's supposed to pick up Paul while the guards of his chain gang (or whatever the Spanish version of one is called) are distracted by a big damn explosion, and get him over the border to France.

Of course, things don't go quite as planned. It's not just that Paul turns out to be - fitting enough for a professional criminal - a bit of a jerk, he’s a rather dumb one at that, and is willing to risk a detour just to pick up his girlfriend Claudie (Trish Van Devere), who one might imagine to be able to make her way to France on her own. There's also the little problem that the people responsible for Paul's break-out only got him out of jail to kill him once he arrives in France.

At that point, the very lonely Harry has already fallen in love with Claudie - something Paul supports for practical reasons - and is willing to risk the little bit of life he feels he still has to help the couple escape. The trio's best route of escape seems to be to reach Harry's Portuguese home and cross the ocean to Africa on a fishing boat the driver owns. They only need to somehow avoid the horde of killers that's on their trail. Yet even if they manage this, things still may not turn out too well for Harry.

The Last Run's director Richard Fleischer is a peculiar case of a man somtimes only regarded as a work for hire guy of dubious talent (which probably is the kind of reputation you deserve when you end your career directing films like Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer), yet who nonetheless has some fantastic films that look pretty damn personal and auteur-ish in his earlier filmography. Especially some of Fleischer's later RKO noirs and many of the films he made in the late 60s and early 70s are well worth a look, and possibly even worth a snooty remark calling the director a "true auteur" or some such.

Until last year, when Warner decided to finally release the film on one of their overpriced Archives DVD-Rs, it was quite difficult to get a hold of The Last Run at all, so it was easy to believe the critical mauling the film got from people like Roger Ebert (whose competence at understanding genre cinema was basically nil). Fortunately, now that one can see The Last Run  with one's own eyes, one just might be able to see a film that certainly isn't flawless but is also much better than the reviews and its rather pained production history (George C. Scott driving away initial director John Huston! George C. Scott ruining his marriage on set and already working on his new wife! George C. Scott being as difficult as Kinski! Etc.) would lead one to expect.

One of the most criticized elements of the film is the lack of dynamic in its action sequences, but watching them in context, I couldn't help but think their dry, laconic, and utterly naturalistic tone is part of the point of the whole affair. After all, Fleischer (or frequently brilliant scriptwriter Alan Sharp) even sets up an explicit contrast between the old gangster romanticism of classic Hollywood and the much dryer tone of his own film through various dialogue scenes between Musante and Scott and another scene where Musante and Van Devere are watching an old gangster movie.

This does not mean the action scenes are completely unexciting. In fact, if you're willing to accept Fleischer's clear emphasis on staying inside the realm of the physically possible, you'll perhaps find them to be unexpectedly effective at raising your blood pressure. Fleischer's direction of these scenes, and really, of the whole rest of the film too, is wonderfully off-handed and laconic, avoiding all big directorial gestures and all showing off - and not by making this avoidance of showing-off its own grand gesture, either. The director grounds his sparse plot in a believable sense of place, giving as much room to the Spanish landscape his characters drive through as to the things happening in that landscape.


Neither the action scenes nor the crime plot are really what the movie is interested in anyway. I believe these elements are only there at all to fulfil the genre expectations an audience will probably have going in. At its core, though, The Last Run is a film much more interested in exploring the nature of loneliness in middle-aged men and the emotional death it can lead to, the difference between the cynical optimism of youth as embodied by Musante and the - ironically - much less cynical pessimism of Scott's age, and the very existentialist (or Nietzschean, depending on your philosophical favourites) concept of hope as the most destructive emotion of them all - even if the one hoping is as conscious as Scott here of how little importance his hopes carry in the greater picture of the universe.

The Exorcist III (1990)

After studiously sitting out the sequel people don’t like to acknowledge, Police Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott) returns to hold bizarre monologues about carp, stare, then stare and stare some more, shout and do everything else you are wont to do when you’re played by George C. Scott. Oh, and he’s onto a rather interesting case, too, for the serial killer known as the Gemini Killer seems to have returned. The problem is that the Gemini Killer’s been dead for fifteen years; however, the victims are found bearing marks only the cops concerned with the case would know about. And as you know, Jim, no cop would ever commit a crime, so there will be know investigation in that direction during the course of the film.

To be fair, that’d be a cold lead anyway, as Kinderman quickly learns when his old friend Father Dyer – remember him? – (Ed Flanders) is the killer’s next victim while having a bit of a lie down in the bizarro world version of a hospital. In the hospital, Kinderman is soon stumbling onto something rather peculiar – a mysterious patient of the “disturbed ward” looks exactly like The Exorcist’s saintly – and decidedly dead - priest Damian Karras (Jason Miller). When he’s not looking like the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif) that is. Clearly, the best course for Kinderman is to listen to the Gemini Killer ranting on and on and on and expositing in a very Dourif manner while from time to time the hospital is hit by a jump scare or two, and a murder or three happens. Also on the program: doubting of faith, a random studio-mandated exorcism by Nicol Williamson, and lots of stuff being Catholic probably wouldn’t much help one to understand.

In the last few years, Exorcist writer William Peter Blatty’s second (and until now last) feature, based on his own book “Legion” (which isn’t called “The Exorcist III” for a reason) seems to have had a bit of a critical renaissance as a much overlooked gem. In so far as this means this is a film very well worth watching, I’m rather happy with this fact; if I’m supposed to pretend this is a good one I’ll just have to disagree (probably while snorting disbelievingly). It’s a fascinating film, and probably as close as US studio horror film can get to the often nonsensical glories of Italian horror of the 70s and 80s, but it sure as hell (see what I did there?) doesn’t work as a narrative or as a mood piece. It also has no dramatic pull whatsoever. Or are there really viewers out there who care about what happens to anyone here?

The plot – such as it is – makes little sense outside the obvious basics of it that could be told in half an hour, and the rest of the film’s narrative is filled out/bloated up by scene upon scene of actors making their way through Blatty’s stilted pseudo-intellectual (that is, not as intelligent as it pretends it is beyond quoting better writers than Blatty himself) dialogue, some suggestions of horrible and creepy stuff that usually don’t amount to much beyond a jump scare – and at this point 2005 and later horror cinema has made me practically immune to those apart from provoking annoyance – and Scott and Dourif out-chewing the scenery.

As a director, Blatty tends to the slow and ponderous, preferring long, static, highly composed in a “look, I’m doing art!” way shots broken by fast cuts to other static shots in the same style to just about anything else. Not surprisingly, this approach is not conducive to an emotionally striking film, it does add quite a bit to the film’s odd charm, though. There’s always something to be said for a director (a dilettante as Blatty clearly is in that role) doing things his own way, the rules and logic of filmmaking be damned, and given my love for the Jean Rollins, Jess Francos, Andy Milligans and Lucio Fulcis of this world, I’d be the last to hate Blatty for it. It’s just that the films of the directors I listed often – once you’ve seen enough of their stuff – reach a point where their own logic starts to make sense to me, whereas Blatty’s film stays abstractedly, distantly weird, instead of obsessively personal, and feels rather more interesting than compulsive.

Having said that, I’m still happy I live in a world where a film like The Exorcist 3 exists, and people appreciate it, for while it doesn’t work for me as much as I wish it would, its willingness to go off the reservation as much as it does, to not be the obvious sequel to the Exorcist the studio of course wanted it to be, and to just do its own thing, if an audience will like it or not, is something I can’t help but respect.

Plus, where else can you find George C. Scott holding forth about the horrors of the carp his wife put in the bathtub for what feels like hours (as well as a joke waiting for a punch line)?

They Might Be Giants (1971)

Ever since the death of his wife, former socially minded lawyer and judge Justin Playfair (George C. Scott) has come to think himself to be Sherlock Holmes, ever attempting to catch his elusive Moriarty, which is to say, the thing that causes beloved wives to die in accidents, people to climb towers and begin to shoot, and so on, and so forth.

Unfortunately, Justin’s brother Blevins really needs to get at Justin’s money to pay off some unsavoury types hounding him, so he decides to drag Justin to the mental hospital of the money-grubbing Dr. Strauss (Ron Weyand) to be declared incurable (whatever that might be) and unfit to take care of his financial business, which would leave that business to Blevins. Strauss wants psychiatrist Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward), possibly nominated for the title of loneliest person in New York for several years in a row, to write Justin off. Watson, though, is a rather more conscientious doctor than her boss, and won’t just sign any old stuff without a thorough examination.

Not surprisingly with this last name, Watson is at first fascinated by Justin, then decides to cure him, and will later even fall in love with him. For the time being, she lets herself being dragged through Justin’s half imaginary adventures that soon see the pair chased by the police, people in white coats, and Blevins’s unsavoury people who have decided that killing Justin and having his brother just inherit the money is an easier way to get it than letting Blevins commit him.

Anthony Harvey’s They Might Be Giants is an often whimsical, generally delightful movie that is quite a bit more complex and layered than it at first seems.

One one level, it is a comedy that is based in sad reality without ever becoming cynical, and somehow even manages not to annoy me despite using the generally annoying romantic trope of the mentally ill being somehow closer to some kind of woozy, tear-jerking reality of things. I suspect the film works for me without causing rolling of eyes and cursing of writers is thanks to the clear acknowledgment it gives of the humanly sad causes of Justin’s identity problem (while also suggesting some humanist nobility to it), the way it doesn’t pretend turning into Sherlock Holmes is just some nice thing Justin does for an mentally more stable audience to gawk at and feel better.

If you’re so inclined, you can of course still find copious amounts wrong with the film’s ideas about mental illness, or about the way a psychiatrist is supposed to act towards her patients (though I’d really rather have Watson who cares a bit too much and can’t separate herself completely from her patients even before she meets her Holmes than the more typical example of the profession who doesn’t give a crap yet still knows everything). I’d argue this just isn’t very relevant to the film at hand, because it does neither want its audience to think they’re better than the people on screen, nor that suffering from a mental illness is a fun adventure.

Rather, a part of the film’s argument is that there’s only a degree of separation between the “loonies” and everyone else, with the former’s reaction perhaps more appropriate to the world we live in, and therefor actually more appropriate to the definition of the word “normal”. Improbably, the way the film sells it, this is an uplifting thing to be told, a bit as if nihilist philosophy had started to negate itself.

The film realizes this argument with a sense of whimsy, a lot of broad human compassion with everyone – even Blevins(!) - except the gangsters who really are more a plot mechanism than characters, and through some truly fantastic performances. George C. Scott is as good and fragile as he ever was, and Joanne Woodward’s Watson projects a generosity of spirit and emotion that has been caged by loneliness but never destroyed it’s impossible not to admire. The character actors playing the strange and curious people these two meet on their adventures are just as wonderful, bringing to life what could be caricatures.

There’s a further level to this rather brilliant film, too, a meditation about the nature of reality and fantasy and the ways they interact, of the construction of tales and of reality as a tale, of the shifting of perspectives and roles (just look at the scene in the telephone information building as a clear example of the last one). As Scott’s character argues in another particularly brilliant moment, it would be insane to assume, like Don Quixote, that every windmill is a giant, but that doesn’t mean some of them might not still be giants. And how would we know if we never looked?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,comedy,anthony harvey,george c. scott,joanne woodward

On WTF: The Last Run (1971)

Oh, it's the film that helped destroy George C. Scott's marriage! The Last Run is also (by critical consensus of ye olden tymes) supposed to be not a good movie at all.

Seen through my eyes, it's an excellent example of existentialist (kinda-sorta) action cinema with a great cast doing great work. I'll explain why in my column on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,crime,action,richard fleischer,george c. scott,tony musante,trish van devere,other places