Friday, October 08, 2010

Pinball on the Fatal Shore

Road Games (1981)
directed by Richard Franklin
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

If long-haul truck drivers are cowboys of the modern world, Stacy Keach takes Errol Flynn by way of Harmonica from Once Upon a Time in the West to tell his open sky tale. Road Games is a thriller, not a horror film, but it's beautiful and epic. The main benefit of all that country is enough loneliness to latch onto the stories of the drivers who pass Quid's eighteen-wheeler. With only a voice on the other end of the CB and a dingo in the cabin to keep him grounded, Quid gets by, but barely. I'm of a mind with the disposition of directors like Richard Franklin: heaven is a truck backlit by lightning on an open desert plain, with a pretty girl opposite the campfire and a killer out there, somewhere, in the dark. Duel might be suspenseful, but you can't beat a face like Keach's cracking jokes to pass the time. Why movies this good aren't better known is beyond me.

Labels: