Word: diners
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...better places do not curdle the diner's juices with Tin Pan Aloha plunk-plunk music. Some of the most memorable songs are English or American ballads rendered in Hawaiian to a Hawaiian beat; The Battle Hymn of the Republic sounds terrific that way. Many other chants have their island-English versions, to wit: The Twelve Days of Christmas, in which "my tutu [grannie] give to me one mynah bird in one papaya tree, two coconut, three dried squid, four flower lei, five fat pig, six hula lesson, seven shrimp as wimming, eight ukulele, nine pound...
...pistol belongs to Teddy (Marjoe Gortner), an aging, long-haired rebel who marches into a New Mexico diner one morning in 1968 and proceeds to hold both the hash-slinging employees and the dyspeptic customers hostage. Teddy's aim is really not to rob or murder his captives but to humiliate them. He forces a haughty middle-class tourist (Lee Grant) to bare her breasts; he makes cruel fun of the diner's crippled owner (Pat Hingle); he tells a fat young waitress (Stephanie Faracy) that she is doomed forever to spinsterhood. By the time that Teddy departs...
...When You Coming Back, Red Ryder, Gortner plays a crazed Vietnam vet who terrorizes a bunch of people in a New Mexico diner in 1968. Both the time frame and the tripped-out pomposity bring to mind the sixties marijuana generation. Background music is provided by the likes of B.B. King and Tammy Wynette, and I kept thinking of those late-night stoned raves in which you immortalize your first love affair on film in your head and try to match its moments to your favorite songs: "And then, after our fourth fight, when I'm crossing Boylston Street...
Eventually they end up at a diner, where Teddy slowly takes control of all the people and subjects each of them to similar humiliations. Comparison with The Petrified Forest is inevitable. As in that movie, most of the action takes place in one room, in which a group of diverse types is held hostage by one violent man. Both are set in roadside cafes in the Southwest. But many of the elements which made The Petrified Forest a great film are missing in Red Ryder. The most important of these is restraint. Bogey was actually at his hammiest in Petrified...
...audience is like the helpless group trapped in the diner, and is treated with equal contempt. Messages are pounded into us without letup--the Vietnam generation turning its violence back on America, the helplessness of women (who do nothing but tremble and bawl, and like Cheryl repeat 90 times, "I'm scared"), the arrogance of power, the sadism built into our society. We are supposed to sit there mesmerized and say, "Gee, I never thought of that," as if we haven't been thinking all these things for a long time. It is no longer enough merely to throw such...