Word: cutter
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ABOUT ten minutes into Cutter's Way, something strange happens. What's gone before has been strictly cinematic--scenes that have become familiar on the screen as part of movie life. Richard Bone trades a few remarks with an older woman he has half-heartedly laid, and then he's down in the hotel lobby, lighting the obligatory cigarette, striding cockily out the door, refusing to pay the valet who wheels him up his old Healy. We've seen all this before, and it has become so familiar we don't even give it a second thought. They used...
...Cutter's Way starts like this, too--and it will feel the need to fall back on it in the end, but after the first ten minutes something utterly different begins...
...story of Cutter's Way, as told by the press, is another one of those taken from Hollywood. Film (then titled Cutter and Bone) is released: film is panned by the incomparable Vincent Canby (who is to movie reviewing what the emperor's new clothes were to haute coterie): film is withdrawn only to be released later by the United Artists Classics division with a whole new ad campaign and is hailed as a nearly lost masterpiece. Art prevail over management, they would have it. And they're practically right...
...lushly irrigated hills of Santa Barbara, the movie focuses on three characters, all half-hearted refugees from the mainstream. They haven't fled to anything else of course: it's a defensive maneuver, and the result is a certain disconnected status. Cutter (John Heard), is a vet who's lost a leg, an arm, and an eye in Vietnam, a man who's tongue is too quick--sometimes it's hilarious and sometimes he should just shut up. He has no social graces, but his venom is directed out there somewhere--a romantic who has retreased to snideness since romance...
Your picture of the overcrowded cell in the Illinois Correctional Center looked great to me. I spent two years living in a cramped berthing area on board a Coast Guard cutter. There was nothing we could do to change our conditions. We didn't dare riot...