Prompted by the death of Sandra Locke, the other night I watched Every Which Way but Loose, you know, the Clint Eastwood bareknuckle boxing movie.
Wkipedia tells us the critics hated this film, which is usually the stamp of approval for us. It was for the public as well, Every Which Way but Loose made over a hundred million dollars.
Coming off of the Spaghetti Westerns and Dirty Harry films, Every Which way but Loose was a risk for Eastwood, (Clint Eastwood like you've never seen him before, proclaims the trailer) but it paid off handsomely. Here is a very interesting film in his canon.
I had forgotten how good this film is.
Every Which Way but Loose looks like the 70's. I don't mean leisure suits and disco balls, I mean harvest gold, pea-soup green and wide collars, work-a-day guys listening to country music. There's a lot of interesting iterations of 70's-Man, usually guys hitting on Philo's Lyn Halsey-Taylor, and they are cast without irony. This is also an LA film. Any of you LA guys want to weigh in on locales? When I first saw his movie as a kid(probably about 1980), it looked utterly contemporary. It's a wonderful time capsule.
You have a motley group of characters, Philo Beddoe (what a name), his happy-go-lucky brother Orville, their cantankerous other, and a love interest for each.
Then there is the biker gang, the Black Widows. Philo is their white whale, and in every encounter he defeats and humiliates them, as does their mother who draws a shotgun on them and chases them off her lawn. The Black Widows are not quite lovable, but they're definitely sympathetic.
Sandra Locke's Lynn Halsey-Taylor is at once adorable and deceiving.
In many ways Philo is the least sympathetic character. Why doesn't he get that Lynn is a flim-flam artist? What's it gonna take?
You've already got a great plot and then someone decided, 'What the fuck, let's just throw an Orangutan in there.' Meet Clyde. Right turn, Clyde.
The sequencing and pacing are perfect.
This film is a lot of things, a romance, a cautionary tale, a man's movie, a comedy, a farce, but above all it is fun.
Most those scenes appear to have been filmed 8n the San Fernando valley, which is this big whole north of the metropolitan part of Los Angeles. Pacoima SFV) used to be known for motorcycle gangs way back when. The bar scenes are probably at the old Palimino which was in North Hollywood (SFV). 48 hours was filmed there as well.
ReplyDeleteSan Fernando valley is a big hole.
DeleteWhen i was maybe six or seven years old and my sister just a couple of years older, my dad took us the movies. He dropped us in one theater by ourselves to watch something oriented for us, and he went in the theater that was playing that movie or it's sequel. That was parenting in the 80s.
ReplyDeleteNice! and thanks!
ReplyDelete