I keep waking up at three or four in the morning so I turned this on on The Criterion Channel. I may have missed some things, like how Lawrence Harvey goes from a guy hitchhiking his way to Louisiana to owning a suit. I thought the lesson was to not pine for your old girlfriends who you haven't heard from in years because she probably moved on to better things, but, no, that wasn't entirely the case here.
American-born Ukrainian Edward Dmytryk cast British-born Lithuanian Lawrence Harvey
as a nice guy hitchhiking from Texas to New Orleans in the early '30's to find his
lost love (Capucine). He meets teen runaway Jane Fonda and
travels with her until she steals from Anne Baxter running a roadside cafe and he sends her on her way.
Turns out Harvey's old girlfriend is now a prostitute working in a brothel run by Miss Barbara Stanwyk. And brothels are run by horrible people.
There's a nice scene where Harvey confronts a street preacher attacking him and Capucine.
Wow, is this ever a bizarre piece of work. Doesn't much resemble the Nelson Algren novel. I think they meant to cast James Garner and Angie Dickinson. The lesbian overtones in the scenes between Stanwyck and Capucine were shocking for the era; then Madam Stanwyck trains her eye on Jane Fonda, whom the actress had known since Fonda was a baby! Eeeew.
ReplyDeleteMostly remembered today for the sinuous black cat in the credit sequence by Saul Bass, not too long after his work on "Psycho".