By Richard Winters
My Rating: 6 out of 10
4-Word Review: Friends help catch murderer.
Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) driving his old beat-up car, a 1966 Austin-Healey, which breaks down in a dark alley during a late night rain storm. From behind comes another vehicle where the driver dumps something into a nearby garbage can that turns out to being the dead body of a young girl. Since Bone’s car is still at the crime scene the next day when the authorities arrive he quickly becomes suspect number one. Bone’s friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard), a Vietnam vet struggling with alcoholism and PTSD, takes on the process of investigating the case to help get his friend out of trouble. The two soon hone in on a rich local businessman named J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliot) whom Bone swears was the man he saw driving the car that dumped the body.
The film is based on the 1976 novel ‘Cutter and Bone’ by Newton Thornburg. Producer Paul Gurian bought the rights to the book and asked struggling screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin if he’d be interested in adapting it to a screenplay. Since Fiskin was broke at the time, he last sold a screenplay, Angel Unchained, 10 years earlier, he was forced to shoplift the book in order to read and adapt it. David Field from United Artists was open to backing it for $3 million, but only if they could find a big-name star. Gurian then went to the home of Jeff Bridges, where he got attacked by one of Bridges’ dogs thus motivating Bridges to accept the part unseen in order to avoid a possible lawsuit. The film was released in the Spring of ’81 where it fared poorly with the critics and the studio was ready to scrap it only for it to pick-up good reviews a few weeks later. The studio then decided to place the film in their ‘classics’ division where it got retooled from it’s former title of ‘Cutter and Bone’, which they felt made it seem like a comedy about surgeons, to it’s current one and then rereleased it in the fall of that year were through good word-of-mouth it managed to recoup a modest profit.
Director Ivan Passer has stated that his motivation for directing the film was to go against what he felt was the ‘cripple mania’ at the time where film characters would get maimed usually through being in the war and then come back better, stronger people. Here he wanted to show that it didn’t make them better, but instead more dangerous.
While Heard certainly gives a good performance, it was originally intended for Richard Dreyfus, I felt he was too much of a caricature of an angry, wounded war vet and I didn’t find him interesting at all. Bridges was his usual transparent self and thus the interactions between two not all that captivating. Elliott is rather blah as well as the bad guy since for most of the runtime he’s only seen from a distance and never has any lines of dialogue until the final 9-minutes, though this does at least give him a certain creepy/mysterious vibe. Out of everyone I was most intrigued with Lisa Eichorn who plays a woman who bounces between the two friends and seems to want to play-off them both.
The emphasis is on the character study with long takes of Heard snarly at everybody he meets including the next door neighbor’s whose car he crashed into and the the subsequent police report, which goes on too long and doesn’t help the film or story move forward. The mystery isn’t as intriguing as it could’ve been because elements of it fall into place a little too conveniently. Bridges witnesses the killer driving away and then right away the next day spots the guy in a parade. Then a couple of days later the friends are talking about the case at a restaurant where the guys’ wife (Patricia Donohue) is sitting right next to them and overhears everything, which again is letting things fall too neatly into place without much effort.
There’s also questions about why the killer didn’t just run Bridges over with his car when he had the chance in order to avoid any witnesses. Also, Bridges is able to recognize the killer/driver, but when I saw the scene it was impossible to see the face of the driver. The viewer’s perspective should be the same as the protagonist, so if he’s able to get a good look at the culprit then we should’ve too.
Spoiler Alert!
Since everything is tied into circumstantial evidence I was hoping for some unexpected twist at the end. For instance having Bridges’ house get burnt down not because of Cale like they initially thought, but instead from the neighbors still angry over their car. The final confrontation in which Bone apparently shoots Cale (the screen fades to black and we only hear the noise of the gun going off) leaves more questions than answers. Does Bone and to an extent Cutter, who was there in the room with him, now go to jail for this? Seems like that should’ve been confirmed one way or the other and leaving it vague is like showing the viewer only half of the story.
My Rating: 6 out of 10
Released: March 20, 1981
Runtime: 1 Hour 49 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Ivan Passer
Studio: United Artists
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Pluto, Freevee, Roku Channel, YouTube
Scopophilia 