Steelyard Blues (1973 Alan Myerson)

"Stupid idiots" Q kept saying about the characters in this movie, but it equally applies to the creative team behind it, particularly writer David Ward, director Myerson  and producers Michael & Julia Phillips. (Sutherland himself was an executive producer.)

The crux of the story is really about the relationship between brothers - one is a free-thinking demolition derby nut who steals to fund his 'career', Donald Sutherland, the other is an up-and-coming politician, who's something of a bastard, Howard Hesseman. Sutherland bands with a group of misfits - prostitute (again?) Jane Fonda, eccentric Peter Boyle, Garry Goodrow and John Savage - to patch up and fly away in an ex army bomber.

The tone is uncertain - it doesn't know what it is. Sometimes it's a fairly bitter relationship drama, sometimes it's like a slapstick film. Perhaps everyone associated was really stoned. (Having said that it was 1973 and that probably applied to most of the creatives in Hollywood.) Altogether it's something of an ordeal to watch. The main problem may be that the Sutherland character - apart from being independent minded - isn't one you care about.

This uncertainty of tone is well caught in the scene in which Boyle impersonates (quite well) Brando in The Wild One and it turns into a knife fight between him and Sutherland, and the latter ends up apologising as Boyle takes a lock of hair as a 'scalp', Is it funny or serious?

The ending is something of a cop-out. Boyle rescues them from the police with horses and says there's 'a helicopter over behind those trees' and they all race towards it to fade out. But over the end credits, there's the sound of a helicopter. Now my gut instinct is that the film was supposed to end on that fade out and with the suspicion that there's no helicopter there (where would he have got it?) and therefore it was one of those downbeat endings favoured in the seventies - but someone chickened out and added the helicopter sound over the end.

To add to the confusion it has two cinematographers - the great Laszlo Kovacs and the totally unknown Stevan Larner - apparently because of reshoots following the initial filming in 1971 directly after Klute.

"How did I get myself into this again?"

These were heady days at Warners. The previous years had seen the studio release Woodstock, Performance, The Devils, Klute, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Deliverance.