One of his earlier works, lying between
Last Embrace ('79) and
Swing Shift ('84), written by Bo Goldberg, one of the screenwriters of
Cuckoo's Nest and
Scent of a Woman, The Rose and
Shoot the Moon - this, though an original screenplay, is based on the true story of a claimed will of Howard Hughes which was dismissed by the court as a forgery... But we're not too involved in that, rather in the life of hard-working idiot Paul le Mat and his lurches from job to job and repossession to repossession, a nice guy who stops to help a tramp in the Nevada desert. This early sequence between he and Jason Robards is at the film's core, the two of them in the truck. Then we meet Mary Steenburgen and daughter Elizabeth Cheshire...
Some distinctive moments (e.g. le Mat's song at the Christmas party, filmed by a director of music videos, a 360-degree pan in a courthouse) and the inevitable background stuff (loved the big plastic cow being wheeled by). Didn't notice Gloria Grahame as Mary's mum...
Early collaboration with Craig MacKay and Tak Fujimoto (editor and cameraman).
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