Arthur Penn (1966)
Late in life, Arthur Penn expressed disappointment with The Chase: ‘Everything in that film was a letdown, and I’m sure every director has gone through the same experience at least once. It’s a shame because it could have been a great film’[1]. All kinds of famous talents were involved. Sam Spiegel produced. The large cast was headed by Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay, adapted from a stage play (and subsequent novel) by Horton Foote. John Barry did the score. It’s not hard to see, though, why The Chase, released just the year before Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, was a commercial failure. Although the film is always a bizarre concoction, the narrative is arrhythmic and the tone uncertain for most of its 133 minutes. Only in the last half hour or so does this noir-ish (though Technicolor) crime melodrama come to flamboyant, hysterical bloom.
On a country road in Tarl County, Texas, two escaped prisoners ambush a motorist. One of the pair kills the motorist, before making off with his car and leaving the other prisoner, Charlie ‘Bubber’ Reeves (Redford), stranded. Calder (Brando), the sheriff of a small nearby town, takes a phone call informing him of the prison break. The sheriff’s side of the conversation is overheard and the news that Bubber, a local man, is on the run and wanted in connection with a murder, spreads like wildfire. In the first half of The Chase, Arthur Penn charts the fugitive’s difficult journey back to the town in alternation with descriptions of its mostly repellent citizens. This Texan locale, though technically fictional, is meant to be quintessential. The demographic includes a plentiful supply of vicious racists, as well as Val Rogers (E G Marshall), an oil baron whose boozer son Jake (James Fox) has been having an affair with Bubber’s wife Anna (Fonda) during her husband’s enforced absence.
This isn’t the only troubled marriage in evidence. Edwin Stewart (Robert Duvall) – like Jake, one of Bubber’s boyhood friends – is humiliated by his scornful, pleasure-hungry wife Emily (Janice Rule). She makes publicly clear her lust for Damon Fuller (Richard Bradford), who’s married to Mary (Martha Hyer), a lachrymose lush. Fuller is the smoothest of the town’s main nasties – not a keen competition when his cronies are Lem (Clifton James) and Archie (Steve Ihnat). (This trio loathes the super-rich Val Rogers and mistakenly believes the sheriff is in Rogers’s pocket.) As Bubber makes his way back home, the action there crystallises in a brace of set-piece parties – one a grandiose celebration of Rogers’s sixtieth birthday, the other a smaller but wilder affair, involving, among other, the Fullers and the Stewarts.
This is a striking shindig in what might be thought Southern Gothic territory. It announces the arrival of the 1960s sexual revolution even in small-town Texas and places The Chase at a precise point of Hollywood history. On the one hand, the sequence, which goes on and on, feels like a hangover from the fruitless hedonism on display in La dolce vita (and lesser European films) a few years before. On the other hand, it anticipates the in vino veritas miseries of middle-class parties in American cinema later in the decade, by which time the country was mired in Vietnam, political assassinations and self-reproach.
Made during 1965 and released in February the following year, The Chase may be just too early to qualify as a shadow-of-Vietnam drama but it certainly reflects the legacy of the JFK assassination – in Texas. The finale sees Bubber escorted by Calder to the town jail before being returned to the larger penitentiary he escaped from. Archie fires a gun at the prisoner, killing him: the sequence mimics the news film of Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald (not that either character corresponds to their real-life counterpart in any other significant way). At the start of the story, Bubber Reeves plays dead to lure the would-be helpful motorist into too close proximity. At the end, Bubber lies in the street – a corpse for real now.
John Barry’s music has atmosphere, momentum and coherence. The Chase lacks the first two qualities for much of its running time and the third throughout. Arthur Penn, in trying to build from a realistic base to the outbreak of mob violence, is working against the grain of Lillian Hellman’s fulminating screenplay. Hellman seems so consumed by the urge to foreground – and mythicise – Southern white turpitude that she largely ignores the need for motivation. I didn’t understand why Bubber, with only a few months of his jail sentence still to serve, decided to escape in the first place; why the townsfolk were hellbent on bringing one of their own to justice; or why Val Rogers takes such drastic action as to join forces with Fuller and his fellow vigilantes in holding the sheriff prisoner in his own jail.
They assault not only Calder but the African-American Lester Johnson (Joel Fluellen). When Bubber makes it back to town, he seeks out Lester in the car junkyard where he works and asks him to get Anna to bring money and clothes there. Fuller et al threaten Lester when they catch him outside Anna’s place. Calder intervenes and puts Lester in the cells, supposedly for his own safety. In the event, Anna comes to the junkyard, with Jake, under instructions from Calder to persuade Bubber to give himself up. Val Rogers then drives in, followed by the vigilantes. It’s not long before the whole town’s there – most of them drunk from whichever of the two parties they’ve been at. They set fire to the place. The congregation at the junkyard is laughable; the conflagration there is a visually powerful expression of the breakdown of law and order. These sharply differing effects encapsulate how weak Hellman’s screenplay is in supplying a plausible framework for what happens, how compelling Penn makes its consequences.
There’s some serious overacting in smaller parts, from across the generations. As Briggs, an elderly estate agent who knows the town backwards, Henry Hull has a keen-eyed wiliness that’s soon tiresome. (Not the actors’ fault but Briggs and his wife (Jocelyn Brando) walk round the town as if it were the size of a stage set.) Miriam Hopkins, in her penultimate film appearance, gives the role of Bubber’s wailing mother everything she’s got, which is too much. It’s no surprise that, when her son is heading back to jail, his face seems to express, more than anything, embarrassment at the racket his imploring mother is making in public. Martha Hyer is as florid here as she was frigid in Some Came Running, though it has to be said Mary is a thankless part. With even less to work with, Diana Hyland, as Val’s flirty daughter (I think: she’s called Elizabeth Rogers, at any rate), is even more OTT. The better supporting players, whose roles are just as sketchy, are Robert Duvall, already a strong presence, and Angie Dickinson, as the sheriff’s loyal wife, Ruby. (Even she addresses her husband as Calder: he’s the man with no forename.) Malcolm Atterbury does well as Bubber’s more quietly mournful father.
James Fox, though surprisingly cast, is adequate as Jake but the acting in The Chase is all about the big three – especially at this distance in time: it proved to be the only film in which either Jane Fonda or Robert Redford shared a screen with Marlon Brando. Sheriff Calder’s disillusion with his job and the town soon starts to coalesce with Brando’s evident boredom with his role. He seems increasingly submerged until he comes up with a confounding surge of great physical acting when the vigilantes beat Calder up – after which, you can’t take your eyes off Brando’s battered face.
Redford is temperamentally miscast as a hothead rascal but it’s hard to mind. He’s convincingly athletic when Bubber is literally on the run, swimming a lake or jumping from a moving train. When he and Anna are reunited in the car junkyard, you can almost sense the two actors’ relief: Fonda, for all her poise and presence, only really comes to life here. (She might have arrived to rescue Redford from The Chase and transport them both to Barefoot in the Park.) The junkyard episode becomes ludicrous as the whole cast foregathers there but it’s likeably funny before they do. Bubber says, ‘It’s been a long day – it’s been a long two years’. He tells Anna she looks good, which is right, and says, ‘I guess I don’t look too good’, which is not only wrong but, with Redford in the role, a contradiction in terms. After all his exertions, his hair is still neatly parted. It can’t be intentional that Bubber seems the town’s classiest, most intelligent citizen but Redford’s witty underplaying is a pleasure to watch.
It’s hardly a turn-up when Bubber is shot as he heads back to Calder’s jail since the sheriff couldn’t even keep himself, let alone Lester Johnson, safe there. Archie is roughly apprehended – he has to be, to complete the Jack Ruby effect – but what happens to him next is anyone’s guess and there’s no suggestion that his fellow lawbreakers will be punished for assaulting Calder. How could they be? The sheriff’s one assistant (Stephen Whittaker) is usually conspicuous by his absence. On the morning after the night before, Calder and Ruby drive out of the place for good. The image naturally calls to mind the departure of Will Kane and his bride that closes High Noon – and a reminder that Calder, in trying to uphold the rule of law, has fought a battle as solitary as Kane’s. The latter’s allies serially deserted him. In Calder’s case, he seemed to be the only lawman in town even before the mob ruled.
16 September 2019
[1] According to Wikipedia, a quote from Arthur Penn: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008).
