Everyone working on this movie was pretty hot -- Hal Ashby had just done "Harold and Maude", Jack Nicholson was in the first real flush of his career, and Robert Towne was about to enter cinema lore with his next Nicholson film, "Chinatown." Given all the talent that was assembled maybe the movie is a slight disappointment, but I think that this is a really excellent character piece. It has enough humor and character to keep the thing moving, but it's really about the dramatic nature of choices and our ability to determine the course of our life.
Nicholson and Otis Young play a pair of MPs who are assigned to escort an unfortunate kleptomaniac youth (Randy Quaid) across the country where he will serve several years of hard time for robbing an empty collection box. Rather than lead the kid directly to the brig, the two MPs take a liking to the kid and decide to show him a good time. They can't tolerate the idea of him going into jail as a virgin, so they take him to a whorehouse where he convinces himself that he's in love with one of the young girls. They get drunk, they do all sorts of things. But in the end they have a duty to fulfill.
Young's performance lacks presence and depth, but Nicholson and Quaid make up for it. I can imagine that Quaid might have been cast in a somewhat similar role in "Quick Change" several decades later because of how well he did in this film. If anyone out there thinks that Nicholson only discovered how to be funny in the 80s or 90s, they should definitely check this one out (or even earlier, Roger Corman's "Little Shop of Horrors").
What I really like about this film is Ashby's light touch. He doesn't hit us over the head with drama or with sympathy for the young prisoner, but instead sets up the Nicholson character as sort of a "crazy" and gradually makes us sympathize more and more with him, helping us to understand why he wants to help the Quaid character so much. He feels that he can perhaps escape the cycle by doing so, maybe he can reclaim some of his freedom. He and the Young character come to believe in the reformation and the evolution they've created so much, that they start to believe that Quaid's character does not even want to escape, which nearly proves fatal. The final feeling of the movie is one of tone more than of impact or drama -- it fills us with the same sadness, a melancholy sadness of the inevitability of everything in our world that is wrong and unjust.
Nicholson and Otis Young play a pair of MPs who are assigned to escort an unfortunate kleptomaniac youth (Randy Quaid) across the country where he will serve several years of hard time for robbing an empty collection box. Rather than lead the kid directly to the brig, the two MPs take a liking to the kid and decide to show him a good time. They can't tolerate the idea of him going into jail as a virgin, so they take him to a whorehouse where he convinces himself that he's in love with one of the young girls. They get drunk, they do all sorts of things. But in the end they have a duty to fulfill.
Young's performance lacks presence and depth, but Nicholson and Quaid make up for it. I can imagine that Quaid might have been cast in a somewhat similar role in "Quick Change" several decades later because of how well he did in this film. If anyone out there thinks that Nicholson only discovered how to be funny in the 80s or 90s, they should definitely check this one out (or even earlier, Roger Corman's "Little Shop of Horrors").
What I really like about this film is Ashby's light touch. He doesn't hit us over the head with drama or with sympathy for the young prisoner, but instead sets up the Nicholson character as sort of a "crazy" and gradually makes us sympathize more and more with him, helping us to understand why he wants to help the Quaid character so much. He feels that he can perhaps escape the cycle by doing so, maybe he can reclaim some of his freedom. He and the Young character come to believe in the reformation and the evolution they've created so much, that they start to believe that Quaid's character does not even want to escape, which nearly proves fatal. The final feeling of the movie is one of tone more than of impact or drama -- it fills us with the same sadness, a melancholy sadness of the inevitability of everything in our world that is wrong and unjust.