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Robert Mitchum is said to have preferred composing songs and poems to acting, this evocative rockabilly ballad encompasses all three of his arts. The world of moonshine transporters is keyed to Mitchum's fatalist-hobo wryness, with running hooch in Tennessee's backroads the axis of his mulish independence. A youth is killed emulating the hero's driving, a dissolve from church services finds the community elders huddled in a shed (decorated with hanging skins and featuring a dozen textures of wood) discussing "pressing business" -- like any other trade, bootlegging is open to a takeover, and Mitchum soon becomes wedged between a brutal racketeer (Jacques Aubuchon) prone to blasting competitors out of the freeway and the federal agent (Gene Barry) seeking his help. Renoir's The Southerner and Karlson's Kansas City Confidential are the bedrock of Arthur Ripley's style, with a certain Bressonism in the straight-ahead starkness of a lunch prayer, a whisky mill in the woods, dancing on the porch. Nevertheless, Mitchum's is the authorial voice, from the life-worn naturalism of his interaction with his son James (cast as his younger brother) to the low-key snap of his humor (he drives his mauled Ford into a garage after storming through a roadblock, "Car's just conked out, thassall"). The driver's dilemma is the rodeo cowboy's in The Lusty Men, surely, and the protagonist's final café encounter with his deadpan beloved (Keely Smith), in which he gives her change for the jukebox and she returns to an empty table, is very close to the Mitchum who once wrote of how "the anguish of my solitude is sweet." The list of influences is extensive (The Last American Hero, Smokey and the Bandit, White Lightning), though its most decisive effect may have been on Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, another profoundly personal expression of a star's eccentric worldview. With Trevor Bardette, and Sandra Knight. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |