Commendable location shooting with a fine sense of place. The place is a small prairie town in Saskatchewan, the time is the tail end of winter when the mid-afternoons can warm up in the low sun but the nocturnal winds are as icy as the hockey rink. The little city survives on wheat and cattle.
There isn't much for the protagonist, Keir Dullea, to do, when he's not working in the local notions shop, so he has put a good deal of effort into creating a particular persona. He's a cocky young fellow who is the erratic star of the hockey team and fancies himself "the Marshall" and sometimes struts around town wearing a Gary Cooper cowboy hat and toting a six shooter, taunting some of the other guys, and only half jokingly. There's little doubt that this is going to get him into trouble.
He and his friend, John Beck, pull all sorts of stunts. They paint an adversary's car, for instance. Beck and Dullea wind up in jail but Dullea is bailed out by Elizabeth Ashley. Dullea has been schtupping all the ladies he can get his hands on because he exudes a kind of rustic charm and is fun to be around, but he has a lot of rough edges too.
When one of his girl friends leaves on a bus for Saskatoon, he overtakes the bus in his convertible, pulls it off the road, and kidnaps the girl at the point of a gun. She objects when he takes her to a windblown, abandoned farm house, but, as I say, he's an ingratiating customer. Here's the exchange between the two of them, just before she leaps into his car and takes off in a cloud of dust.
Dullea: "Well, I guess all you whores have hearts of gold." Girl: (Throws herself at his feet.) "What do you want me to do?" That happens to me all the time but I can't see how Dullea has earned that kind of earnest petition. I mean, he's whacked this girl around before and he's just kidnapped her. Furthermore, his stunts were harmless at first but they've grown more disruptive and outrageous as the story progresses.
The only person who seems to love him without qualification, his screwy behavior notwithstanding, is Ashley. She's a deserted wife, no longer a child, and she wants to be married and settled down with children. Dullea wants nothing more than to be remembered in this whistle stop of a town. He and Ashley take a shower together in which we get to see a good deal of exactly what Ashley is offering him. She's perceptive. She knows herself and she knows Dullea. And she has a splendid figure. And how does Dullea respond as she crawls all over him on the shower floor, soaping him and rinsing his body parts? He compares her to ANOTHER of his girl friends, telling her that, although Ashley is good in the sack, his other amour was better. Just what women love to hear.
It's a little like "Hud", only Dullea is not a selfish bastard. He's just crazy. He doesn't particularly want to hurt anyone except, at times, the local sheriff, whose chief defect is his sanity, and then only when they meet in the center of the street and draw pistols on one another, as in some Grade B Western.
It's a slice of life on the Canadian prairie, but what a slice and what a life. One of the most important issues is whether the hockey team will survive. I've always disliked ice hockey, mostly because I can't skate myself. So in my unbiased opinion, it's a highly overrated skill. On top of that, the growing popularity of sports like hockey and basketball are symptoms of pathology in our national character. Nobody cares about baseball any more because the viewers have to wait too long for the pitcher to wind up and throw, and maybe nothing happens for -- gulp -- for several minutes in a row. Basketball and hockey are all action all the time. An enraptured five-year-old can gawk at it because something is always in motion. We've lost our patience with having patience. We want it -- and we want it now! End of lecture. Will someone help me down from this soap box? What -- nobody?
There isn't much for the protagonist, Keir Dullea, to do, when he's not working in the local notions shop, so he has put a good deal of effort into creating a particular persona. He's a cocky young fellow who is the erratic star of the hockey team and fancies himself "the Marshall" and sometimes struts around town wearing a Gary Cooper cowboy hat and toting a six shooter, taunting some of the other guys, and only half jokingly. There's little doubt that this is going to get him into trouble.
He and his friend, John Beck, pull all sorts of stunts. They paint an adversary's car, for instance. Beck and Dullea wind up in jail but Dullea is bailed out by Elizabeth Ashley. Dullea has been schtupping all the ladies he can get his hands on because he exudes a kind of rustic charm and is fun to be around, but he has a lot of rough edges too.
When one of his girl friends leaves on a bus for Saskatoon, he overtakes the bus in his convertible, pulls it off the road, and kidnaps the girl at the point of a gun. She objects when he takes her to a windblown, abandoned farm house, but, as I say, he's an ingratiating customer. Here's the exchange between the two of them, just before she leaps into his car and takes off in a cloud of dust.
Dullea: "Well, I guess all you whores have hearts of gold." Girl: (Throws herself at his feet.) "What do you want me to do?" That happens to me all the time but I can't see how Dullea has earned that kind of earnest petition. I mean, he's whacked this girl around before and he's just kidnapped her. Furthermore, his stunts were harmless at first but they've grown more disruptive and outrageous as the story progresses.
The only person who seems to love him without qualification, his screwy behavior notwithstanding, is Ashley. She's a deserted wife, no longer a child, and she wants to be married and settled down with children. Dullea wants nothing more than to be remembered in this whistle stop of a town. He and Ashley take a shower together in which we get to see a good deal of exactly what Ashley is offering him. She's perceptive. She knows herself and she knows Dullea. And she has a splendid figure. And how does Dullea respond as she crawls all over him on the shower floor, soaping him and rinsing his body parts? He compares her to ANOTHER of his girl friends, telling her that, although Ashley is good in the sack, his other amour was better. Just what women love to hear.
It's a little like "Hud", only Dullea is not a selfish bastard. He's just crazy. He doesn't particularly want to hurt anyone except, at times, the local sheriff, whose chief defect is his sanity, and then only when they meet in the center of the street and draw pistols on one another, as in some Grade B Western.
It's a slice of life on the Canadian prairie, but what a slice and what a life. One of the most important issues is whether the hockey team will survive. I've always disliked ice hockey, mostly because I can't skate myself. So in my unbiased opinion, it's a highly overrated skill. On top of that, the growing popularity of sports like hockey and basketball are symptoms of pathology in our national character. Nobody cares about baseball any more because the viewers have to wait too long for the pitcher to wind up and throw, and maybe nothing happens for -- gulp -- for several minutes in a row. Basketball and hockey are all action all the time. An enraptured five-year-old can gawk at it because something is always in motion. We've lost our patience with having patience. We want it -- and we want it now! End of lecture. Will someone help me down from this soap box? What -- nobody?