While not actually a good
movie in terms of artistic achievement and/or narrative ambition, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is in some
perverse ways the epitome of its genre. Throughout the ’70s, filmmakers made
innumerable ennui-drenched flicks about young people hitting the road for crime
sprees that represented a sort of anti-Establishment activism. In the best such
pictures, the wandering youths articulated their angst so well that their
actions felt meaningful; in the worst such pictures, the basic premise was
simply an excuse for exploitative thrills. Since Dirty Mary Crazy Larry exists somewhere between these extremes,
it’s emblematic of the whole early-’70s road-movie headspace. The picture also
has just enough cleverness, reflected in flavorful dialogue and oblique camera
angles, to validate the existence of genuine thematic material,
even in the context of a trashy lovers-on-the-run picture.
Peter Fonda stars as
Larry, an iconoclastic driver pulling crimes to earn money for a new racecar.
Riding shotgun during Larry’s adventure is Deke (Adam Roarke), an accomplice/mechanic.
During the movie’s exciting opening sequence, Deke breaks into the home of a
grocery-store manager (Roddy McDowall) and holds the man’s family hostage while
Larry waltzes into the store to collect the contents of the store’s safe.
Unfortunately, Larry’s most recent one-night stand, Mary (Susan George), tracks
Larry down during his getaway—she steals his keys and
threatens to tell the cops what he’s doing unless she lets him tag along. Thus,
Deke, Larry, and Mary form an unlikely trio zooming across the Southwest with
police in hot pursuit. Working from a novel by Richard Unekis, director John
Hough and his assorted screenwriters do a fine job of balancing talky
interludes with high-speed chase scenes, creating an ominous sense of
inevitability about the drama’s impending resolution.
Still, the
characterizations are thin—although the crooks’ main pursuer, Sheriff Everett
Franklin (Vic Morrow), is an enjoyably eccentric small-town lawman—and the
performances are erratic. Roarke anchors the getaway scenes with a quiet
intensity that complements Fonda’s enjoyably cavalier persona. Englishwoman
George, however, is a screeching nuisance, presumably impeded by the task of
mimicking redneck patois. She’s so annoying, in fact, that it’s easy to laugh
when Fonda berates her with this bizarre ultimatum: “So help me, if you try another stunt like that,
I’m gonna braid your tits!” Dirty Mary
Crazy Larry zooms along as fast as the cars featured onscreen, delivering
several nerve-jangling crash scenes and generally setting an interesting trap
for the reckless protagonists. Yet the movie’s ending changes everything, and
the finale is so quintessentially ’70s that it’s reason enough to check out
this hard-charging romp.
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: GROOVY
