Stay Hungry.

Review #2577: Stay Hungry.

Cast: 

Jeff Bridges (Craig Blake), Sally Field (Mary Tate Farnsworth), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Joe Santo), R. G. Armstrong (Thor Erickson), Robert Englund (Franklin), Helena Kallianiotes (Anita), Roger E. Mosley (Newton), Woodrow Parfrey (Uncle Albert), Scatman Crothers (William), Kathleen Miller (Dorothy Stephens), Fannie Flagg (Amy), Joanna Cassidy (Zoe), Richard Gilliland (Hal), Mayf Nutter (Richard Packman), Ed Begley Jr (Lester), John David Carson (Halsey), and Joe Spinell (Jabo) Directed by Bob Rafelson (#2159 - Head)

Review: 

"I place a great deal of faith in the collaboration of the entire company, and in the atmosphere in which I am shooting. I try to remain susceptible to what the characters are telling me, what the weather is telling me, what the sounds around me are telling me… While I do enormous amounts of preparation, I go through a strange emptying process before I go to the stage, and try to evaporate all the preconceived notions I have about how the day’s work is going to be. I try to stay vulnerable."

Sure, let's hitchhike our way down to the other other other Bob Rafelson movie. Some might associate him with Head (1968), featuring The Monkees (of which he helped to develop), or perhaps with Five Easy Pieces (1970), or even The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), with the latter two featuring Jack Nicholson. After the release of Gardens, Rafelson found himself hitchhiking across the South. Rather than doing a movie about the slave trade (with countless time spent in libraries and apparently Ghana), he landed upon something suggested to him by a friend: a book by Charles Gaines called Stay Hungry. Sure, he didn't really care about making a straight adaptation of the book, but he felt that the "conclusions of his novel were not unlike the conclusions I had come to in both Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens" (of course, in the book, it ends with a death). Stay Hungry made a bit of money when it came out in April 1976, and you can safely say each of the three leads went on to bigger things. Incidentally, the actual Gaines was an interesting fellow - he was a writer and outdoorsman that could talk about the outdoors just as much as bodybuilding, and he served as one of the driving forces behind Pumping Iron (1977, as inspired on his 1974 book with George Butler), the docudrama featuring Schwarzenegger during the 1975 Mr. Olympia competitions*. Rafelson's next film was to be Brubaker, only to be fired due to having troubles with a certain studio executive (who he apparently socked in the jaw). Instead, he returned to the screen with The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).

It's not every day you get a movie where someone decides, hey, let's steal a painting from a building for the hell of it, nighttime be damned. It's the kind of movie that makes you feel like you're on the road without actually travelling very far in any one direction. It's a freeform movie with plenty of episodes of things to go around, whether that involves the pursuit of bodybuilding (particularly at the end), bluegrass playing, hookers, women trying to do karate*, and dudes who really chase the hunger of the next thing rather than stay comfortable. That last point, wrapped in the eccentricities of what Rafelson loves to show in the "New" South makes for a movie that will please its admirers and annoy those who can't get into its 102-minute runtime. I thought it was mildly fun, mainly when it actually does find some footing with these people for warm fun, which mostly comes with Schwarzenegger*, who has a sweet sense of charm within his acceptance of being a big man in a world that likes to look (and use) big men like him for as long as they possibly could (not particularly sure what the costume worn for the workouts is supposed to really mean, but, well, that's something else). Bridges and Field have a certain type of casual nature together that sees both just dally around for the sake of dallying, where the former has to realize he needs something in his life, anything that sounds different than the usual hollow times in a big house (or drunk) while the latter can only help but speak her mind. These are folks who think that any type of different thing is better than whatever they have now (even if choosing a fling over barhopping is not particularly that effusive). Granted, this is also a movie that doesn't really paint a wide canvas of characters as you want it to do (I could take more time with whatever Kallianiotes is doing in karate, for example), but there are a handful of amusing little moments if you let the movie wash over. You get bits of wormy Spinell to go with a fairly youthful Englund, a fairly creepy (and timely) Armstrong and a climax that lets things hangout without too many definitive endings. It is a movie firmly wrapped in its time and place of a different type of South with Birmingham that moves on its own terms in ungainly but fascinating entertainment.  It's a movie for folks who want to make their own mark and think shooting the breeze might as well be the way over as long as the hunger burns. 

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

*Did I mention that he was a co-creator of the sport of paintball? No, really. Incidentally, Schwarzenegger earned his one acting award for "Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture", mainly because they forgot that it actually wasn't his first film role: others may remember him, billed as "Arnold Strong" playing Hercules (albeit in a dubbed capacity) in Hercules in New York [1970]. He also appeared in a bit role in The Long Goodbye [1973].

*There is a rumor that Rafelson asked for Field to take off her shirt and kiss him (specifically Field said it in her autobiography). He denied this, although he subsequently did get divorced from his wife (and production designer) Toby Carr Rafelson soon after this film. So it goes.

*Orange belt as a kid, folks. Kinda fun.