This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Straight Time, directed by Ulu Grosbard.
Straight Time (1978, dir. Ulu Grosbard)
Note:
Thank you to Sugar for bringing this film to my attention. Straight Time was written by Nancy Dowd, who also wrote the incoherently perfect film Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains (1981). Dustin Hoffman, whose previous two films had been All the President’s Men and Marathon Man (both 1976) says this as his first line in the film: “Hotdog.”
10 minutes:
Much of Straight Time is a duel between two characters: Max Dembo (Hoffman), an ex-con who tries to go straight, and Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh), his authoritarian-with-a-ready-smile parole officer. But it is also a duel between two actors in what are, arguably, the performances of their careers, and it’s a draw. In this scene, Dembo checks in with Earl, who has already taken a disliking to Max, who is overly polite and apologetic and meek in his efforts to win Earl over. One of the great strengths and mysteries of the movie centers on this question: why does Earl so dislike Max? Is Earl a sadist who enjoys abusing his power? (At one point, without warning, he handcuffs Max to his bed while he searches his apartment, for which Max later gets even by handcuffing Earl to a chain-link fence in the median of an interstate and pulling down his pants and underwear.) Or does Earl recognize from the very beginning that Max is, in fact, a career criminal who is either incapable or unwilling to change his ways?
The frame captures Max with that inscrutable look on his face, as he watches Earl fill out paperwork that will directly impact Max’s future:
Earl: I’ll make a deal with you. If you find a place to sleep today and a job by the end of the week, you don’t have to go to a half-way house. Now is that fair?
Max: That’s fair. I appreciate that.
Max’s face: is he already thinking how to con Earl? How many steps ahead of the game is he in this moment? He smokes nervously during the conversation. Is this because he can barely keep up his performance as a contrite, polite ex-con, or because there’s no performance at all, and he’s just terrified of Earl’s power over him?
40 minutes:
Max has been jailed — put there by Earl — while the results of his drug test come back. He’s clean. This is part of a slow panning shot around the cell showing four guys, the shot ending on Max. In this frame, a cellmate is reading a magazine. The pink blanket. The bare feet. The vertical window as if lit by some supernatural source. The grunge of the analog Seventies, before the clean binary disposition of the digital. In March 1978 — the same month and year that Straight Time was released — the English punk band 999 released their debut album, which included the single “Emergency,” a jaunty anthem, some of whose lyrics go:
Never make the same mistakes
Sometimes care sometimes not
See them bleed and see them rot.
In its first half, Straight Time has the look and feel the Neil Young Seventies: long hair, slow camera work, easy stretches of time, and a sort of resigned nostalgia tinged with cynicism. But by the second half, the film has switched into its punk rock mode, calling to mind the fierce beauty of Penelope Houston and The Avengers, or 999, as Max wrests control away from Earl’s car, handcuffs him to the highway fence, and begins an anarchic crime spree.
70 minutes:
Max doing a U-turn in the middle of the street on his way to steal a gun that he’ll use in robberies. He is a completely different man now than he was during the That’s fair / I appreciate that portion of the film’s first half. The vanishing point of lights in the shot, the freshly painted and beautifully lit XING, the car going the wrong way.
The wrong way. Watching Straight Time is like having spears thrown at you from ten different directions at once. You’re under assault, but you’re not sure from where. You think, I can handle this movie, but you can’t. As a product of the Seventies the movie is as incoherent as the decade itself, and it elevates this incoherence to 114 minutes of distilled menace and pleasure and ambush. Whereas late-Sixties outlaw / anti-hero films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Easy Rider (both 1969) romanticized characters who lived outside the law, many mid-Seventies films like Straight Time and the Missouri Breaks (1976) offered a more ambiguous and blurred vision: in a nation that had lost confidence in politics, in leaders, in the military, in the family, and in American exceptionalism itself, was there even such a thing as “good” and “bad” characters?
If you’ve never seen Straight Time before and you decide to, be careful. You will be ambushed.
6 responses
Some movies just seem to cry out to be compared, and for me, Straight Time has always seemed like a bookend to Night Moves, the Gene Hackman film from a few years earlier (my favorite pair of movies is The Graduate and the original Heartbreak Kid, made by those old comedy partners, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, respectively). Both are about, among other things, the uneasy transition from one era to the next, and both offer fascinating looks back at the 1970s, although from different angles. And both, not incidentally, are on some level baffling.
Great point about Night Moves–an equally, as you say, baffling (in a good and ambiguous sense) movie. The main characters’ motivations in both films is practically inscrutable. All sorts of cues typical to movies are withheld, and in Straight Time especially there is no “major speech” moment where Max explains his motivations. There’s a great moment where he’s at his friends’ house (Wily, played by Gary Busey) and Busey’s son jumps up on Max’s lap during dinner. Looks shoot back and forth between Wily and Wily’s suspicious wife (Kathy Bates) and Max, and there is just so much there, so much said without words. I think that’t the moment when Max realizes or decides he will never “go straight,” though this doesn’t become clear until later. Damn. There is so much more . . .
Yes! What a brilliant examination of this film, Nick. You affirmed so much that I saw in the film and you also showed me things I didn’t see. Thank you. I always love your column, but this one is extra special.
This movie is, in fact, a morality play.
A morality play is a type of theater which was common in medieval Europe. It uses allegorical characters to teach moral lessons… Usually these lessons were of a Christian nature. The morality play still remains an influence in our modern culture. The “everyman” character of Mildred Pierce is making a life journey and is easy to relate to. She is influenced by others along the way and gradually gains a personal integrity. The names of the characters in these plays often reflect the intent of that person and the name “Pierce” certainly complies with this.
Clearly any critique of Mildred Pierce should note the quasi-incestuous romance between Veda and Monty. The film was modified from the original because of the pressure the Hays office put on the producers. The violence in the film became more central to the plot than it was in Cain’s novel.
It should also be noted that the star of this movie was, at some time, according to an adopted daughter, beating her with a coat hanger and sleeping with every leading man.
When times get tough, the American film industry takes our minds off the everyday turmoil and gives us something to REALLY squirm about! The year was 1945….hummm
Campbell, this is the Straight Time discussion. Mildred Pierce is just down the hall. And not to turn this into a MP chat, but I rewatched that movie and cannot agree that it’s a morality play. But that’s the beauty of MP–it’s sort of everything.
Larry,
Thanks for the “heads up” …it’s not the first time I’ve bolted into the wrong room!! MP is a must see for film buffs just because the interpretation is so open to good discussion…but not on Dustin’s time…..
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