Death Car on the Freeway (1979)

Los Angeles. A mysterious driver kills young, pretty women by crashing into their cars with his van while playing some mean fiddle music via outside speakers. The police, as represented by one Lieutenant Haller (Peter Graves), has no clue how to stop what’s going on, seeing as they are stumped by incredibly fiendish tricks from the perp – like the killer repainting his van and using new licence plates. Victim blaming seems the best solution to Haller.

Fortunately, up and coming TV reporter – and at this time the “reporter” part of TV reporter was actually still relevant  – Jan (Shelley Hack) gets in on the case even before the police does. While she doesn’t have the resources of the authorities, she actually owns a functioning brain. Alas, Jan also has to cope with The Patriarchy as well as The Man. Not only is Haller an idiot, her bosses don’t really appreciate her public criticism of car culture, and last but not least, she herself still has doubts if anything she has achieved until now is only because her separated husband Ray (George Hamilton) once gave her her first break. Then there are Ray’s 70s macho attempts at getting her back…

I came to Death Car on the Freeway for Hal Needham directed death car on the freeway action on a TV movie budget but I stayed for some rather good mainstream late 70s feminism (as written by a guy). Which is to say, if you’re expecting this to be much of an action film, or a thriller, you might end up disappointed, for while the killer’s modus operandi is pleasantly silly, and what there is of the car action and suspense scenes is directed by Needham with the vigour and competence you’d expect of the guy who directed Smokey and the Bandit, about eighty percent of the film really concern Jan’s personal struggles against crusted society structures trying to hold her down.

To my surprise – I’m not much of a guy for films mostly interested in talking through issues even when I agree with their politics - I found myself rather engrossed in the proceedings. It certainly helps that William Wood’s script is as pointed as a US 70s TV movie script needs to be but still presents its case without too much melodrama. It’s not exactly kitchen sink realism (praise be to the Old Gods), but outside its sometime thriller plot, this is not a film of grand melodrama but one sympathetically portraying the sort of crap a young, talented and engaged woman has to fight through for no good reason whatsoever. Obviously, there’s also a rape metaphor sitting practically in the open, which again the film treats with dignity. Needham is a much keener director of this sort of thing than I had him pegged as, too, keeping things moving even when there are no cars on screen and visually centring on Jan in quite a few subtle ways.

All the while the film also provides a very nice feel of its time and place, subtly hinting at the weirdness of living in LA (at least people living in LA tell me it’s weird) and doing one of the things popular culture can do so well: explaining the world or a place at a specific moment in time through slight (or large) exaggeration. There’s a feeling of veracity to much going on in the film that again surprised me.

On the acting side Hack presents herself as sympathetic, never overplaying or underplaying Jan’s frustrations and keeping us rooting for her in the drama as well as the thriller parts. Hamilton’s performance as that most unmanly kind of guy, a man who can’t cope with his supposedly beloved wife being a muck-raking truth-seeking reporter who cares, is hilariously on point, going from the smug, to the sleazy, though mostly ending up with a facial expression of vacant arrogance whenever Jan tells him what she wants and feels in opposition to what he tells her she should want so perfect it’s as funny as it is infuriating. Whoever cast these two actors is at least half responsible for Death Car’s success as a film.

So Death Car on the Freeway ends up not just being a rather different film from the one I expected but also better in ways I’d never expected of it.

In short: The Five Man Army (1969)

Somewhere in revolutionary Mexico. Certified criminal genius The Dutchman (Peter Graves) summons a group of old acquaintances and friends for a heist. Knife-throwing swordsman Samurai (Tetsuro Tanba, trying to go broaden his reign of being in every Japanese film to Italian cinema too), food-fixated strongman Mesito (Bud Spencer), explosives expert and cardsharp Captain Augustus (James Daly) and unsuccessful bank robber and former trapeze artist Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) are perfectly willing to take part in one of the Dutchman's plans, seeing they all have hit rock bottom in one way or the other.

The Dutchman has been hired by Mexican revolutionaries to steal half a million dollar of foreign bribes in gold that are bound to be delivered to the military dictator of the day, and instead give them to the revolution. Officially, every member of the Dutchman's team is promised a thousand dollars, but he heavily hints at further plans to steal the gold from the revolutionaries too.

However, before anyone can think about any kind of double-cross, there are a few problems to solve. Chief among these problems is that the gold is being transported in a heavily armed and guarded train only a fool or an army would take on in a frontal assault. Fortunately, the Dutchman is quite the planner when it comes to impossible missions.

From time to time, Italian producers didn't just import a handful of foreign stars to improve their films' chances at success in international markets, but also made attempts to give the director's chair to an American. Usually, these films didn't amount to much, for the US directors were generally of the dependable workhorse type of filmmaker badly equipped to work through the peculiarities of Italian scripting practices, as well as just not the sort of visual stylists many of even the lesser Italian directors were.

The Five Man Army's director Don Taylor is quite a good example of the type of American willing to do this type of work for hire. As a very experienced director mostly working on TV, Taylor is enamoured of a straightforward point and shoot style that makes the film look visually impoverished when compared to other Spaghetti Western. Ironically, how much of the film was actually directed by Taylor is not clear at all. Depending on the source, Taylor either directed most everything or was replaced by the film's producer Italo Zingarelli after a day or so. Since not even the actors playing in the damn thing are telling the same story about its production history, we will probably never know for sure.

Personally, I'd go with Taylor as the film's main director, though, because Five Man Army looks like the product of exactly the kind of director Taylor was, someone who doesn't have much of an eye for beauty or for mood, but who knows how to keep a film moving. The script (curiously co-written by US animation writer Marc Richards and Dario Argento) plays more to Taylor's strengths as a director than is normal in this sort of project, replacing much of the moral ambiguity and cynicism typical of the Spaghetti Western with more easily digestible boy's adventure tropes, and featuring a narrative that is as straightforward as the director's style.

Consequently, Five Man Army isn't much to talk about as a Spaghetti Western, but works perfectly fine as a straightforward Western with (also straightforward) heist movie elements. Plus, it has a pretty great scene where Tetsuro Tanba hacks an office full of soldiers to pieces while Nino Castelnuovo looks on with a shocked expression, which is something that can't be said about many Westerns, Spaghetti or not.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,don taylor,peter graves,james daly,bud spencer,tetsuro tanba,nino castelnuovo