Cross Country (1983)

Ad “creative director” Evan Bley (Richard Beymer) is starting on a hastily planned road trip from his native New York to California. Surely, this may or my not have something to do with the fact that his – half secret – girlfriend was brutally murdered in her bed. Even before Evan has left New York, we learn that he’s a pretty angry and violent kind of guy. In a strip joint, he picks up dancer/would-be actress Lois (Nina Axelrod) who seems to push a lot of his sexual buttons, gets into a violent altercation, and then finds himself waking up on the backseat of his car, well, actually in Lois’s lap, while Lois’s friend John (Brent Carver) does the driving.

Obviously, a heated melange of sex and violence, secrets and lies ensues between these three; none of them’s a particularly pleasant character, and they all seem to have problems with sex, dominance, and violence in all their combinations.

At the same time, we regularly pop in with the man investigating the killing of Evan’s girlfriend, one Detective Roersch (Michael Ironside). After some time of beating people up and/or threatening them, Roersch hits on Evan as his most probable suspect. He’s not going to file that in any report, but is instead planning on finding Evan and blackmailing him to pay for the treatment of Roersch’s ill wife. Which, come to think of it, is probably the purest motive any character in this movie has for doing anything, yet also fits nicely into the film’s thematic thrust.

For thematically, Paul Lynch’s early neo noir/proto erotic thriller Cross Country is very much concerned with all the shitty horrible things people are willing for to do for love, sex, or the things they believe are one of these; it’s also interested in the more subtle ways dominance expresses itself in human relationships, featuring more then one scene in which the most obviously dominant character is not at all the one in control of the situation. This does fit nicely with the noir traditions the film obviously moves in, only no studio era Hollywood film would ever have dared even suggest to express its ideas about people and the world they inhabit in sex scenes quite as explicit, steamy, and often uncomfortable as the ones here. And really, once the erotic thriller as a genre was much more codified than it is here in its infancy, it quickly became impossible again to go quite this far into the more unpleasant recesses of the human mind while showing a lot of naked flesh.

Needless to say, nobody in this movie is a particularly pleasant person, but it escapes the curse of the classic “why should I care about any of these assholes” by also making them unpleasant in human and understandable ways, really mirroring rather typical human failures in businesses of the heart and the productive organs on a more intense scale.

Lynch is a interesting director, having a huge filmography in TV, but frequently dipping into the sleazier and more interesting parts of the silver screen as the director of nearly forgotten (and basically unavailable) gems like this, or rather less gem-like and certainly not forgotten movies like the first Prom Night. Lynch’s work here is stylish and intense, focussing on a world that’s dark and grimy, appropriately people by sweaty characters of dubious morals, giving the whole affair a nightmare noir quality that shines through even in the muddy VHS-based version that seem to be the only way to see the film right now.

The acting’s pretty fantastic throughout, the four main actors all portray their characters with intensity and ambiguity, always suggesting emotions not honestly expressed and a sexual and emotional intensity which feels wrong in all the right ways. Which really is a good way of describing the whole of Cross Country.