Honky Tonk Freeway.

Review #2565: Honky Tonk Freeway.

Cast: 

Beau Bridges (Duane Hansen), Beverly D'Angelo (Carmen Odessa Shelby), William Devane (Mayor Kirby T. Calo), Hume Cronyn (Sherm), Jessica Tandy (Carol), Teri Garr (Ericka Kramer), George Dzundza (Eugene), Joe Grifasi (Osvaldo), Geraldine Page (Sister Mary Clarise), Howard Hesseman (Snapper Kramer), Paul Jabara (T.J. Tupus), Jenn Thompson (Delia Kramer), Peter Billingsley (Billy Kramer), Daniel Stern (Hitchhiker), Celia Weston (Grace), Deborah Rush (Sister Mary Magdalene), Frances Lee McCain (Claire Calo), with Jerry Hardin (Governor), and John Ashton (Otto Kemper) Directed by John Schlesinger (#1431 - Midnight Cowboy)

Review: 

"I see HONKY TONK FREEWAY as a comedy about characters, so it needs extremely fine care and acting. This is what appealed to me, because I’m mainly intrigued with the people in my films rather than with the plot. This is a comedy about people living on the brink, and that’s the way most people actually live, I think. "

To be honest, I had this film on my radar for a couple of months because of its unusual allure. You've got an Academy Award winning director (12 years, but sure), a couple of name actors...and a movie that was a noted financial failure (with Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment in particular taking the hit in a time where they also took part in productions of The Jazz Singer and Can't Stop the Music). Apparently, the first step in the making of the film came with producer Don Boyd, who was travelling around locations when working near Boston that gave him an idea to then take to playwright and aspiring screenwriter Edward Clinton. As it happened, John Schlesinger wanted to make a big comedy movie after finishing work on Yanks (1979). When Schlesinger came into the production (who once stated that some of the charm that attracted him came from the "naivete" and "fresh [writing]" of Clinton), a handful of drafts were crafted with the collaboration of Clinton (which namely involved the characters in town and development). With a movie production he called at the time his "most complicated" (owning to a production that ballooned to over $23 million with filming in Florida [Mount Dora, Sarasota, mostly] to go along with orphans and various animals) before more money was spent on promotion before distribution by Universal Pictures that, to put it mildly, did not find any type of audience. At any rate, Schlesinger did keep directing, with such movies as The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) and Pacific Heights (1990) while Boyd* produced a few films every now and then, most notably with Aria (1987) while Clinton never wrote another film. 

Evidently, certain folks thought the movie was "anti-American". What exactly is un-American about disciplined chaos? People love a good scalawag, particularly when they see themselves in the person getting, shall we say, screwed over. There's a wide variety of ridiculous people all covered with this movie (one with quite the time capsule: a person at one point is shown wearing an ERA yes button*) that happens to be funny (in shorter terms, it's the type of folks who don't care if you use the word "virago"* in a sentence). Is it a great "satire" or one with useful "irony"? Look, let me level with you on something that seems straight enough to ward off a conman: you are either going to have fun with a comedy because you laughed enough times to have it win you over or you did not have fun. I had fun with these oddballs, ones who don't have that much shame to go around. In their eyes, being subtle isn't worth a damn if it doesn't aid in chasing "the dream". Sure, the dream could be as simple as playing hardball to get an off-ramp (what's a little bribery in the name of community), believing that a carnivorous pony is the book ticket, or trying to make it to Florida of all places to settle down*. Some of the episodic elements are hit and miss, mainly because you can only go so far over the place with getting folks to a small Florida town. Devane is probably the best part of the movie because there is something so entertaining about his desperation as both mayor and preacher in a town that goes for whatever he wants in the simple art of the deal: even weird publicity is still publicity (beyond the attempt to make a safari park attraction, anyway*). Dzundza and Grifasi make for fair enough goofball robbers while you get some worthy religious (and inevitable) hypocrisy from the pair of Page and Rush. Others end up mostly fine in characterization but likable enough if you happen to appreciate the presence of say, Bridges (duh) or D'Angelo (sure) or Tandy (take it or leave it). My only quibble is the ending, because it doesn't really know how to end besides, I'm not kidding, a motor collision involving a character nobody cares about (Jabara, playing a wannabee singer in a movie that already loves its title song a bit too much) and a rhino. Sure, it can be construed as following along the lines of other madcap movies such as say, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), but you would hope for something a little better for a movie that already could be thought of as (wrongfully) a poor man's Nashville (1975). As a whole, it comes and goes for 108 minutes of useful enough entertainment that has its ebbs and flows with humor coming in all sides of the oddballs of America that may be up your alley on the curiosity freeway.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day!

Yes, you heard that right, Acknowledged in August Again. I had enough fun with it back in 2024, so let's do it all over again with some movies that didn't get proper recognition back in its day and see if they deserved better. 

Next up...Fraser. Buscemi. Sandler. AIRHEADS!

*Special credit goes to this article I stumbled onto when googling the movie that I think delivers a bit of insight into the movie on their own terms: Box office failure: "Honky Tonk Freeway" and the risks of embarrassing the United States by Julia Prewitt Brown

*Boyd is a busy guy, as evidenced by stuff such as this: The University of Exeter - Honorary Graduates - Saturday 17 January 2009 morning ceremony

*The thing about not being religious is if you don't believe, then Phyllis Schlafly may just be dead rather than in Hell, or, worse yet, Heaven.

*Okay, I read that word in a tweet once.

*I knew someone who lived in Florida. They're dead to me now, but I hope they enjoyed that state because I'll be damned if I spend time there.

*Incidentally, Devane landed his most noted regular role as a politician-turned-businessman in the soap opera Knots Landing two years after this movie. Nice.

The Birds.

Review #1739: The Birds.

Cast: 

Tippi Hedren (Melanie Daniels), Rod Taylor (Mitch Brenner), Jessica Tandy (Lydia Brenner), Veronica Cartwright (Cathy Brenner), Suzanne Pleshette (Annie Hayworth), Ethel Griffies (Mrs. Bundy), Charles McGraw (Sebastian Sholes), and Lonny Chapman (Deke Carter) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock (#219 - Rope, #223 - North by Northwest, #446 - Spellbound, #447 - Psycho, #450 - Vertigo, #455 - Rear Window, #553 - Strangers on a Train, #800 - Shadow of a Doubt, #910 - Notorious, #963 - The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, #964 - The Ring (1927), #965 - Downhill, #970 - Mr. and Mrs. Smith, #977 - Frenzy, and #1343 - The 39 Steps)

Review: 

The thing about doing a creature feature is that one has to really allow themselves to become immersed in the idea that the director (or writer) wants to show in taking something you could see any day of the week and make it something that could potentially unnerve you, or at the very least pique your curiosity. I suppose if anybody seemed up to the task of trying to make a movie about birds, Alfred Hitchcock (described by some as "The Master of Suspense") would spring to mind quickly. Of course, this happens to be the first film that was directed by Hitchcock after the success of Psycho (1960), which has been argued to be his most famous work. Perhaps the biggest credit is the use of the sodium vapor process to get the shots of the birds to look effective (as opposed to the bluescreen process), and Hitchcock brought in Ub Iwerks (of Walt Disney Studios, the leader in the process) to work on the film - the process involves a variety of things such a yellow screen, an optical printer and two different elements of the footage. Evan Hunter (best known for his work in crime fiction with the 87th Precinct novels and a writer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents for two episodes) was brought in to write the script (for his part, he would later state that Hitchcock would "take outrageous liberties with what I had written" with what he allowed his actors to do with the script). This was adapted from the short story of the same name by Daphne Du Maurier, which had first been published in 1952 as part of her collection The Apple Tree (radio adaptations had been done of the story, incidentally). Hitchcock had adapted her works before with Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940). Apparently, Du Maurier did not like this adaptation, probably because it changes the setting from England to California while going from a focus on a family in a cottage to an offbeat coupling and a controlling parent. Of course, one inspiration that helped Hitchcock involved him hearing about a 1961 attack in Capitola, California that involved birds crashing into buildings with disorientation (three decades later, it was discovered that this occurred due to the birds eating algae that had become toxic). Hitchcock would ultimately do three further films in the 1960s that resulted in varying levels of success before he closed his career with thrillers in Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976). 

Perhaps there was too much responsibility placed on the shoulders of a green actress. Hedren (a model for over a decade) was approached by Hitchcock after he had seen her in a commercial while watching The Today Show, and she soon signed a seven year contract; she had assumed she would soon be on the aforementioned Presents program, but actually he aimed for turning her into a film actress that would debut in a lead role (complete with screen tests and training); perhaps amusingly, she would appear in the "sequel" three decades later with The Birds II: Land's End (1994), which is about as much one needs to really know about. Of course, maybe one really needs a certain type of understanding of what it means to cultivate suspense that might seem familiar for those who would see future films such as Jaws (1975) or Tremors (1990). Perhaps one cannot be too harsh for a film that is meticulously executed in its shots and effects, one that is a worthy movie to look at with patience. All of this is a crock for me to say what became evident before the last shot: dignified lingering in a bit of muck is at the end of the day still one that has a bit of muck on it that needs picking no matter how pretty it is. Simply put, it lingers for quite a bit of time on folks that barely justifies having two hours with them, as if I really need an entire justification for someone wanting to go on a whim to somebody's place and give them lovebirds; it is far more interesting with thrills than anything it tries to do in humor or with family drama, that much is for sure. Maybe the tension reflects the times that the birds attack, but we are still talking about a movie that only gets some of its tense atmosphere with the right amount of cohesiveness. You can put all the window dressing you want about what the film represents in themes, but I don't see it as being any more useful in execution than something like Them! (1954), which if you recall involved mutated ants. But at least one can say the effects are well done, particularly since it was a blend of animated and live birds for various shots. So yes, there is a main group of actors, and they are fairly decent here despite my misgivings about just who matters or doesn't matter. Hedren might seem a bit anxious here, but she does eventually grow into the suspense (i.e. when the film stops trying to make me care so much about her journey into the Bay) that helps us get more and more gripped in tensing one's nerves. Taylor is stuck in the middle, as if one is begging him to be more involved with the birds than with the aforementioned Bay element, and the parts with Tandy are more "move the hand along" than anything - overall, not flat, but still. Tandy is okay, but being okay in a Hitchcock film with clinging mothers is a weird distinction (of course Cartwright being just an okay kid also makes it weird). Pleshette honestly is the most inviting presence, and she only has a few moments to really spring interest in being the earthy contrast when paired against Hedren (again, this is probably personal preference).

Honestly, testing one's patience in life could probably be assessed by how you view the sequence in the diner, where there is a discussion that goes on and on about supposed bird attacks and so on (gee, are the birds around?); one bird attack later where everyone is a bit rattled, a hysterical lady yammers on about who to possibly blame and honestly the one thing that works comes when Hedren slaps her and moves on to other things. I suppose I am not fair to the first hour, since the birds attack twice in that same span of time. But hey, there are moments that plod along in each hour, more so in the sequence involving an incessant playing of "Risseldy Rosseldy" in an attempt to build suspense that only results in an earworm. I guess there are benefits to making a monster movie that doesn't explain its story or end its reign of terror with a pat resolution (Hitchcock did not even want to have any kind of credits to follow after the last shot of the film, but Universal added in a brief studio logo shot). Oh please, my brain says: how much does one need to say about why birds are attacking when most people have both positive and negative memories that involve birds in the first place? But I guess that makes it an interesting predecessor to later films that wouldn't spring to easy solutions (such as say Halloween, for example), and for that one has to appreciate its efforts. Besides, if one really wants to watch someone try to make a movie about birds with absolute zero execution of tension or characters (complete with a brief shot of Hedren!), Birdemic (2010/2013) is right there to make you appreciate filmmaking or the bounds of using your time wisely. As a whole, being an overrated movie can still mean one has made a good movie if the right hands are at the wheel, and Hitchcock for the most part does what is needed to make things stay on course for a thriller. It certainly was an interesting step for Hitchcock in his fifth decade of filmmaking, that much is for sure, and it works out for any Hitchcock devotee for all of its qualities (flaws or no flaws) whenever your curiosity for birds is at hand.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Next Time: Spider Baby (1967).