Olde Review: Bad Company (1972)

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

Bad Company (Robert Benton, 1972) Bad Company is a wonderful movie. It is wise, it is funny as hell, and it combines death and terror in its comedy. Everyone I know who has seen it has extolled it as a minor masterpiece.

Why, then, wasn't it popular?

Why wasn't it seen by many people?

Well, its stars, although fine actors giving perfect performances weren't "names"--Barry Brown, Jeff Bridges (this film was made soon after he completed The Last Picture Show), John Savage (now on TV),* Jerry Houser (who was an acting dynamo in The Summer of '42), Geoffrey Lewis (the rabbitty Western character actor), and David Huddleston (an all-too-ignored character actor). Gordon Willis, the brilliant photographer of The Godfather and Klute photographed it. And Harvey Schmidt's piano music seems almost a part of the image.

Why didn't it make money? Because it was a modest little production with good ideas and had no Dino DeLaurentiis shelling out $24 million on publicity and gimmicks.**

No, the only things Bad Company had were great unsung performances, an unpretentious direction, and a good story. It is at the time of the Civil War, and a bunch of lads get together to rob, and steal...and survive. They are already outlaws for have refused induction into the military. Drew Dixon decides that it would be best for him to hitch onto a wagon train to the westward territories that are still wild and, more important, are not States of the Union. He falls in with some "rough types" led by Bert Jake Rumsey, and, like Benton-Newman's Bonnie and Clyde, their subsequent partnership results in laughter and death. It was rough out there in the Old West. In the less-than-accomplished hands of one of its own screenwriters, Bad Company became the best adaptation of one of their scripts, better than Bonnie and Clyde. Bad Company will appear first on the program. Go early and don't miss anything.

And incidentally, Benton and Newman's new movie with Lily Tomlin and Art Carney will be out fairly soon thanks to producer Robert Altman who saw something special in their extra-special little movie and gave them a second film four years after their auspicious debut.***

This was broadcast on KCMU-FM on January 20th, 1977

So...not much to go on as far as description (but I resisted the temptation to change anything in the review), but the film IS good...a little rough in parts, if you're of a sensitive nature—men are shot untheatrically, there are some hangings and a rabbit is skinned (off-camera but the sound design is good). Boys rough-house and, generally, are boys. But, this may be the most unadorned western ever made...with the possible exception of Meek's Cutoff (I should put that one up one of these days). There is literally nothing romantic about this tale of young draft-dodgers heading West to the territorial wild-lands out of perview of the Federal Government. For many, it's an opportunity to start with little, for others it's a chance to plunder what little there is, but there are few rules other than those needed to survive. You sort of make those up as you go. As Huddleston's "Big Joe" says at one point "I'd like to get my hands around the throat of the son of a bitch that told me to 'Go West."

Shot in Kansas, the film is the very definition of "austere." You couldn't even call it "quaint," but, rather, set in "early impoverished." And the performances by the cast are uniformly excellent, with Jeff Bridges in the coltish version of the excellent actor we've come to expect. The one name that might be unfamiliar is actual lead of the film, Barry Brown, who is so good that you wonder why you might not have seen more of him—he starred in Peter Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller, and did a few more bit parts, but committed suicide in 1978. You see him in this and you say, reflexively, "what a waste," but that's true of any suicide.

This is a very good film, and he's great in it. 

* Not sure what this is referring to, although the IMDB has him appearing in a show called "Gibbsville" around the time of this review. Savage would appear shortly in The Deer Hunter.

** Not sure what this means, but I suspect I was making a slam at the new Dino-produced version of King Kong Dino opened it despite my protests.

*** That would be The Late Show which didn't do very well at the box-office as I recall, although Benton would use the old private-eye theme of that film in other movies. And weep no tears for Benton-Newman: they went on to write the first two "Superman" movies. Benton made Kramer vs. Kramer, won the Oscar, and made one of my favorite films Places in the Heart. He's still directing and writing, 2007's Feast of Love, being his last directorial effort.

As of this writing, "Bad Company" (1972) has not been released on DVD. More's the pity, as I'd like to re-acquaint myself with this one. You can buy it on VHS, however.

Since the movie opened, a rock band took the name (inspired by this very movie), and two other films using that title have been released--the latest being a lousy Anthony Hopkins-Chris Rock spy comedy directed by Joel Schumacher. It is available on DVD.

Good news. Bad Company (1972) IS available on DVD--in a stripped-down presentation from Paramount Home Video from 2002. Here is the link to it on Amazon.com.

Places in the Heart

Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 1984) Robert Benton's distillation of life growing up in Waxahachie, Texas during the Depression begins with an unfortunate accidental death, which expands to an unfortunate deliberate act of evil, but ends, after Earthly trials—from both Man and Nature—with an ambiguous epiphany that extends the simple gift of community into a surprising, almost shocking, expression of spiritual healing and harmony--one of the gutsiest segues from hard-scrabble reality to the Mystery of Faith ever put to film.

The cast is impeccable with unsentimental work from Sally Field, to pitch-perfect early performances from Danny Glover and John Malkovich, to excellent work by Ed Harris, Amy Madigan and Lindsay Crouse. All portray an extended family that forgo the boundaries of blood and race to pull together and survive the deprivations of Nature and man. It's a movie that doesn't shy away from showing people at their worst and quietly displaying them at their best.

Sure sounds like heavy stuff, but the artists behind and in front of the camera make it compelling drama that stays clear-eyed and rarely sinks into easy sentimentality. Quite the opposite, actually; Glover plays the role of a poor share-cropper with a tentativeness that awaits disaster, and Malkovich makes his blind war vet a petulant jerk. Plus, there's a collection of townsfolk that includes greedy bankers, murderous racists and opportunists of every stripe. In To Kill a Mockingbird, racism seems like bad manners and poor up-bringing, while in Places in the Heart it's a way of life and charity is the exception, rather than the norm.

For the Spalding Family, it's a story of tragedy and accommodating, changing and "making do" when they lose their stability in the community and become charity outcasts, banding together with other unfortunates to, as in the parlance, "pull yourself up by your boot-straps" and discovering along the way that charity is something you give in equal measures to accepting. Something about the quality of mercy being twice blessed (now, where have I heard that before?). It's a story of perseverance in the face of great change, and, if not welcoming and embracing change, at least having the grit to roll with it. It's one of my favorite films from a fine, often disregarded film director.

And that ending. It comes out of nowhere, punches you in the ventricles, and leaves you with a final image that is, at first, shocking and confounding, but, as it sinks in, moves beyond the factual to the spiritual and embraces time and memory and the broader outreaches of community—beyond mere property lines and borders and extends to the heart...and the soul. 

Gets me every time.

Don't Make a Scene: Places in the Heart

A Warning: this scene, coming as it does at the end, is so SPOILERIFIC, that seeing it, without the accompanying film, will, at the very least, leave you guessing and confused, and at the most, ruin the entire movie for you.  If you have not seen this movie, read no further, but instead, seek out this film.  You won't regret it.

The Set-Up: Unfortunately, what most people know Places in the Heart for is Sally Field's second (and very deserved) win of the Oscar for Best Actress in 1984, and her blurted exposition of "I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!" in her acceptance speech. It takes away slightly from the terrific movie that Robert Benton shaped from the wheat and chaff of his boyhood days in Depression-era Texas, and that Field holds together as its center.

The movie begins with the fracturing of a family and a community—the town's Sheriff, Edna's husband is killed, horrifically and accidentally, when a town kid, drunk and randomly discharging a firearm, squeezes the trigger when the gun is pointing at him. Subsequently, the boy is lynched by town-folk, his body presented to Edna in a perverse show of community support and "justice."

Nothing is the same. Events, natural and unnatural, whirl to throw hurdles at the family and the community's existence, and the story ends at a town gathering place—church—where everyone comes together and Benton ties the story up in a neat bow.

The film ends with one of the most startling (and, for me, haunting) expressions of life, death, Love and Faith. At the communion breaking of bread and drinking of wine, the camera pans along the celebrants in a kind of roll-call of characters, and if one is paying close attention, one notices that the church-pews might be a bit more crowded than they were in the preceding long-shots of the church interior. But, it isn't until the the shot reaches the character of Moze, sitting and communing in the segregated church.

"What's Moze doing there?" We'd just seen Danny Glover's character leave the farm for good, so what's he doing in the Church? Did he come back?  Obviously, there's a scene missing, where...etc.

It's troubling. Troubling enough that you might gloss over the fact that John Malkovich's character, who doesn't seem particularly religious, is sitting with the Spaldings. We pause at Edna, and at that point, the film pivots and turns in the direction of the surreal...and of faith. Sitting next to Edna is her slain husband, Sheriff Royce Spalding, killed at the very beginning of the movie and whose death shapes the events that make the movie, who takes the sacrificial wine, the blood of Christ, and hands it to Wylie, the young man who mistakenly killed him, and was subsequently lynched by the mob of Waxahachie men-folk. 

We don't see Moze or Royce or Wylie in the long shot; they are not there and are either dead or missing in action. But, as the scriptures says, love never ends, and their presence is there, their spirit, their place in the community.

And in the heart.

The Story: "What's going to happen to us?"

Waxahachie, Texas, 1935. The death of her husband forces Edna Spalding (Sally Field) to seek other forms of income to keep her family in their home. She hires a share-cropper (Danny Glover) to oversee the planting of cotton in her field, hoping to win the bonus for bringing in the first crop. She rents a room to the blind brother-in-law (John Malkovich) of the town's banker who holds her home's mortgage. Events splinter some and galvanize others, and as school teacher Viola Kelesey and her husband (Amy Madigan, Terry O'Quinn) leave for Houston and a new life, the church they pass hold Edna and her household, as well as Margaret Lomax (Lindsay Crouse) and her husband Wayne (Ed Harris)—with whom Viola was having an affair, and affair that Margaret has only recently discovered.

Action!

"This is my story, this is my..."

"...song, Praising my..."

"...Savior..."

"all the day long..."

"This is my story..."

"This is my song..."

"Praising my Savior..."

"..All the day long."

PREACHER:  This morning we take our text from First Corinthians, the thirteenth chapter, versus 1 through 8.

PREACHER: "Though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels and have not love, I am become of a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal"

PREACHER: "And though I have the gift of prophecy and all knowledge and have not love, I am nothing."

PREACHER: "And though I bestow all my gifts to feed the poor..."

PREACHER: "...And have not love..."

PREACHER: "It profiteth me nothing."

PREACHER: "Love is patient..."

PREACHER: "...kind. Love is not jealous or boastful."

PREACHER: "Love never ends."

"I come to the garden alone"

"While the dew is still on the roses"
PREACHER: "On the night before his crucifixion"

"And the voice I hear, falling on my ear"
PREACHER: "Our Lord gathered with his disciples"

"The Son of God discloses"
PREACHER: "He broke the bread and blessed it."

PREACHER: "Saying 'Take, eat, this is my body.'"

PREACHER: "And He took the cup and said 'Drink, this is my blood, which I shed for thee.'"

"And He walks with me"

COMMUNICANT: The Peace of God...

"And He talks with me"

"And He tells me I am His own"

"And the joy we share as we tarry there"

"None other has ever known"
COMMUNICANT: The Peace of God...

"He speaks and the sound"

"of His voice"

"Is so sweet the birds hush their singing"

"And the melody"

"that He gave to me"

"Within my heart is ringing"
FRANK SPALDING: The Peace of God.

EDNA SPALDING: The Peace of God.

"And He walks with me"

"And He talks with me"

"And He tells me"
SHERIFF ROYCE SPALDING: The Peace of God.

"I am His own"

WYLIE: The Peace of God.

"And the joy we share as we tarry there"

"None other..."

"has ever known"


Places in the Heart

Words by Robert Benton

Pictures by Nestor Almendros and Robert Benton

Places in the Heart is available on DVD from Sony Home Entertainment.