Thanks to the current fuel crisis and the tanking economy, I tend to feel a pang of guilt whenever I switch the channel and stop to watch motorsports. As a kid, I loved motorsports and two of my biggest heroes were Formula One driver James Hunt and Motorcycle Grand Prix rider Barry_Sheene . Now I have the choice of NASCAR, F1, IndyCar, Drag Racing, MotoCross, Rally driving, Dirtbiking, etc… And I always feel like they might want to tone it down a bit and save some of that gas for the rest of us to keep the costs down a bit. Maybe play some NASCAR Thunder on the Wii instead, something like that.
Sure, there was an oil crisis also going on in 1973, but that didn’t seem to stop anyone from making the kinds of movies where the main object of entertainment is ostensibly a 70 minute car chase across the northern California. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is one such film, but you could add Vanishing Point, Duel, Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, Gone in 60 Seconds and Death Race 2000 to that list. Anytime you have a simple first reel set-up and 70 minutes or more of cars chasing each other, you’ve got a 1970′s hit movie. Add some desert-road diners, a couple of gas station fights, and at least one middle-of-nowhere motel, and you have a blockbuster on your hands.
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is about a simple a set-up as it gets. Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke rob a supermarket, and discover their getaway vehicle has Susan George in it. Peter shagged Susan something rotten the night before, in a motel, but unbeknownst to him she’s a wily drifter who discovers what they’ve done and forces them to let her tag along. Cue 70 minutes of spectacular high-speed car chases and mindblowing car and helicopter stunts.
There are some interesting points that make DMCL stand out from more commercial fare like Smokey and The Bandit, however. For a start, there’s no musical score. There’s a song at the beginning, one at the end, and a couple of times where Susan turns on the radio, or you hear one in the background, but there is no composed incidental music anywhere in the movie. It’s a strange effect that brings you closer and closer to their world, as you hear nothing police radios and V8 engines as the soundtrack to their lives.
Another thing is that, despite knowing that these are criminals that just robbed a grocery store, their reasoning behind it (Fonda is a wannabe NASCAR driver and Roarke is his mechanic, but they couldn’t get a sponsor to afford a car fast enough to enter any races) allows the audience to forget what they’ve done. We almost instantly like them, and all we care about is that these guys, with their free-wheeling lifestyle and easy charm, get away with it. At times, you even want their many attempts to ditch Susan George to succeed, as she does come across at a tad annoying. She is, though, an interesting character – a chronic liar, pretending to be a dumb blond trailer-trash good-time chick, but sometimes little moments of education and street smarts shine through, relentlessly clinging to Larry almost as a father figure, needing of attention and some kind of thrill in her otherwise mundane drifting life. The script finally gives her a backstory, provided by the police no less, but she herself has lied so much about her past I can’t even believe what’s on her criminal record. Suffice to say, she has one, and the two store robbers have one, and that means only thing. A shocking, but appropriate ending.
DMCL is a classic cult car chase movie that makes you forget how much gas costs now, even with the knowledge that back then, at the height of the 73 oil crisis, it was only 53c a gallon. Sit back, switch off your brain, enjoy the speed, and don’t forget that this movie, when it came out in 74, was distributed almost exclusively to drive-in movie theaters.
