Town Without Pity-Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966)-A Film Review   

 

DVD Review

 

By Sam Lowell

 

The Chase, starring Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, directed by Arthur Penn, based on the book by Horton Foote, screenplay by Lillian Hellman, 1966

 

Okay let’s go by the numbers here. Take a play about small town oil boom town 1950s Texas by the great Texas novelist Horton Foote (okay, okay maybe not the greatest that title would have to go Larry McMurtry in his prime with The Last Picture Show). Throw in a screenplay by Lillian Hellman who despite her inability to tell a politically truthful statement back in her Stalinist sympathizer days could write excellent screenplays-just ask Dashiell Hammett. Add in a great and thoughtful director Arthur Penn (who later expressed dissatisfaction with the results of the film). Top off with a whole crew of young up and coming actors like Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickerson, and Robert Duvall, who were still hungry (and a well-known one in Marlon Brando when he still had a hungry edge). Result a pretty good sleeper film from the 1960s The Chase which I am surprised I did not see back in the day but which sticks out as ensemble cast film from an age when such melodramas would be too over-played.         

 

Funny this film could be called The Chasers since it is much about the sordid, dysfunctional, sometimes comic life styles of the town’s residents as about the guy being chased. That guy Bubber (played by a very young Robert Redford who frankly did not, does not fit the category of Bubba when you think about that good old boy type) who escaped the state penal farm with another con who had gotten frisky with a guy they were trying to rob and killed him so the escape turned into felony murder thus creating the chasers as Bubba headed back to town after being left behind high and dry by his fellow con and after striking out on his other options.

 

Naturally Bubba’s movements are of great concern to the high sheriff,  Calder, played by Marlon Brando, to Bubber’s young and attractive wife, Anna, played by Jane Fonda who while he was in stir was having an affair with the son of the local magnate banker, to that son Jake who was a friend of Bubber’s from childhood, to that banker who was worried once he found out that his son was having an affair with Anna, to one of that banker’s Walter Mitty employees, played by Robert Duvall, who ratted him out when they were kids, to his distraught parents worried that the sheriff will shoot first and ask questions later, and to half the township’s population worried that Bubber will come back and seek revenge for any hurts imposed on him. Will wild out on them and their comforts mainly drinking too much booze, rousting blacks, and having a confusing set of sexual affairs for which one would need a scorecard-if one were interested.     

 

Although Sheriff Calder tried might and main to impose the sense of the rule of law on the angry, scared and drunk townspeople who in the end turned into just another vicious mob bent on vigilante justice that drunken mob got out hand and Bubber got a few slugs and his face down right on his hometown street. Some of this one is a little too melodramatic especially the casual sex-capades thrown around during the night’s drinking bouts but overall the film gave an interesting slice of life in the golden age of the oil boom down in oil fields Texas.