Three Films Make A Post: A Western Classic in the tradition of 'Shane' and 'High Noon'.

Bite the Bullet (1975): This Western (not at all in the tradition of Shane and High Noon, whatever the taglines said) by Richard Brooks concerns an early 20th Century horse race across the Southwest of the USA. It’s a film certainly interested in the adventure, and the physical toll these adventures take, but at its core, the film does very much treat its race as a way to explore the nature of the USA, the divisions of class and race, the way crass commercialism can turn into acts of quiet heroism, the vagaries of love on an aging cowboy’s wages, and the way people of a certain age drag their pasts around with them. With Gene Hackman, James Coburn, Candice Bergen, Ben Johnson, Jan-Micheal Vincent and so on, it has a cast that helps Brooks turn something that could be a bit too didactic for its own good into something at once lively and epic.

Rancho Deluxe (1975): Frank Perry’s Rancho Deluxe, made in the same year, seems also very interested in the question of America. But unlike the Brooks film, it also has an anarchic quality to it and quite a few jokes, good, bad, and strange to make, so it never quite seems to come to an argument, and certainly no conclusion, except that sex and nudity are good (and pretty funny), rich people suck (in a very non-sexual manner), and that there’s something to be said for having a very peculiar sense of humour. And everything’s better with Jeff Bridges and Harry Dean Stanton, of course.

Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976): Keeping with the decade, this AIP production directed by Mark L. Lester does its best to transfer the kind of Bonnie and Clyde doomed gangster plot that’s more at home in the depression era US into then contemporary times, with mixed results. From time to time, the film really hits on a moment or two that manages to cast very different times in parallel; at other times, it just seems to go through the sub-genre motions and couldn’t afford the period dress. The performances by our titular characters, Marjoe Gortner (also getting to preach for a moment) and Lynda Carter (who also sings and is nude, providing for more than one kink, it that’s why you’re here), are a mixed bag too, both making at least half of their scenes more interesting through their presence and choice, the other half more awkward.

It’s never a less than interesting film, though – and even this early in his career, Lester knew how to shoot a great low budget action scene or three.

In short: Man on a Swing (1974)

Lee Tucker (Cliff Robertson), the chief of police in an American small town, encounters one of the worst crimes his home has ever seen. A teenage girl has been murdered and later disposed off in a somewhat ritualistic seeming manner. Tucker – clearly a professional – starts on a methodical investigation that does not seem to be leading anywhere. Normal proceedings are very much interrupted when a man called Franklin Wills (Joel Grey) contacts the police. Factory worker by day and psychic in his free time, Wills has a strange charisma, and even stranger habits. He also seems to know details about the crime nobody but the police and the killer know about, which is of course the sort of thing Tucker is bound to notice.

Tucker begins to treat Wills like a puzzle to solve, at times using him like a genuine source, at times as a suspect, always as the sort of object that doesn’t quite fit into any category he – or anyone with a rational mindset – can completely comprehend.

On paper, Frank Perry’s Man on a Swing is a police procedural “based on true case”. The direction most often emphasises the detail-oriented elements of Tucker’s style of police work with a near documentarian eye, really focussing camera and audience eye on the way lines of investigation are arrived at and explored. Perry’s doing his best not to bore with this, though, often getting in and out of scenes with some kind of elegant or clever edit or another, never wasting his or our time on the details that have no bearing on cases or characters.

It’s only around Wills when the film seems to loosen its nearly documentary belt, music and camera work becoming much more consciously dramatic; that same contrast is mirrored in the acting styles of the film’s main characters: Cliff Robertson is all laid back and thoughtful, with small, precise gestures, where Grey is all nerve and shaking, quaking and jittering, mood-swings and tension.

These contrasts in style seem to me to be rather the point of the film, a successful if not always easy to watch attempt to portray a moment where two very different views of the world – a practical materialism and irrationalism – come into contact and onto a collision course. Throughout the film, there’s always the impression that Tucker and Wills can’t come to grips with each other because their respective toolboxes for viewing the world are simply not made to comprehend one another. So as much as Tucker tries to rationally understand Wills, and Wills tries to emotionally manipulate Tucker, they never do manage to get the other really as deeply into their grasps as they want to, not even with the film’s cold reveal at the end that suggests so many serial killer media to come.