Cutter's Way (1981) Reviews

• A hauntingly beautiful portrayal of cynicism and the pathetic human condition

  greenscreen22005-04-01

  I stumbled upon this movie at the Nickelodeon on Cape Cod the year of its release...at a time when VCR's and DVD's weren't a part of our culture...when you had to travel to obscure and far-out theaters to see obscure and far-out films during the fading window of opportunity offered as its limited run at the movie house. What a gem. I was instantly riveted by the story and the classic performances that brought it to life. The pathetic human condition personified in Cutter, Bone, and Mo is so exquisitely rendered as to be tragic...only salvaged by the clear-eyed wit and insight of John Heard's Cutter and the tempered and logical cynicism and indifference offered up by Bone(Jeff Bridges)as the balance that only these begrudging friends could provide each other. Lisa Eichorn's character(Mo) exhibits equal measures of the qualities both her male couterparts have and her subtle performance points up the conflict she feels in simultaneously rejecting and craving their opposing energies. The scene where she chews them both out for their selfish and naive plot and their spirited responses seems to spill from their beings as genuine emotion...not written dialogue...and it still sends chills through me...very powerful...and the scene where she is made painfully aware of Bone's incurable drive to bed women as she falls prey to his momentary sympathies ..when coupled with her husband's(Cutter) inability to give a soft refuge to her is so tragically realistic...tears flow. Everyone's shortcoming's cross-up everyone else's and as the surrealistic climax develops its symbolism and power are Shakespearian. This movie works as a crime thriller, a portrait of the underbelly of American culture most evidenced in its loss of confidence and embrace of cynicism that came to the surface post-Vietnam...but most successfully as a great character-driven love story and tragedy.

• "And be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him"

  chaos-rampant2010-03-29

  How many movies can you name where a very grizzly Ahabian figure, peg leg eye patch and all, prowls the seemy backalleys and streets of Los Angeles trying to pin a gruesome murder to a powerful oil baron? The movie starts with very direct Moby-Dick references, Cutter, the one-legged veteran back from Vietnam with scars to last him a lifetime, refers to Bone as Ishmael and the small bar they meet is called The Encantado, before it segues into a pattern of various 70's crime/noirish diversions to very basic human questions, life and death, pain and loss. Cutter is convinced the oil baron is the man they're looking for, the wealthy upper-class who is above justice and above reproach, yet the movie proves mercifully ambiguous, wonderfully 70's in that aspect. Cutter and Bone never know for sure and neither do we, but at some point it stops to really matter. The movie is not really a whodunit not because we never discover who done it but because we don't care, the movie doesn't care, because at some point Cutter and Bone, lower-class thirtysomethings with broken lives, nowhere to go, and their friendship permanently shattered by something that involved Bone and Cutter's wife, barge into JJ Cord's mansion uninvited, and somehow, in a strange quiet almost surreal way, one-legged Cutter is suddenly riding a white horse through the gardens in a frenzy, stomping party guests and upturning tables in his furious path, like he's back in the Vietnam jungle and running not away from something like enemy soldiers will run from enemy fire but towards it in a final mad dash, and out of the bushes and trees of JJ Cord's mansion emerges Cutter's Way, the movie now pure sublime and primeval, going out in a final upflare of stubborn and dying revenge. Cutter confronts JJ Cord and when he puts on his mirror shades, we understand that we're looking at the personification of Uncle Sam, so that he may not be guilty for that one girl's murder but he's guilty for something, and more, that Cutter is there to strike not at the mysterious old man, but through him, to strike "...all that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick [...] and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him". Perfect. Even Apocalypse Now didn't transfigure the enigma that lies in the heart of its literary source in a way quite as faithful simple and effective. The powerful thematic content and the subtle-but-not-so-subtle way Ivan Passer handles it is one thing Cutter's Way does right. The movie is fierce gritty and stubborn, like its halfmad protagonist striking in fits of rage the air with his cane and shooting holes in the sea, but it's also quiet bittersweet and tender and takes its time to get where it needs to. I like how the crime mystery slowly fades and dissolves in the haze of the hot summer Los Angeles afternoon before it's allowed to become tedious or an end in itself and instead we get to spend time out in the pier or inside cramped living rooms with the heavy curtains pulled, there are empty whiskey bottles on the floor and a soft jazz tune is playing on the pickup. It's like the movie is whispering to itself "there's still time" or maybe "we still have one last night left", because we're looking at people broken who can never be made right again, the pieces were cracked long ago or in faraway places and they can't be found again, so there is this one last night left for everyone. When Bone makes love to Cutter's wife, the one woman he could never conquer, she breaks down and cries. There's not much joy here, but sadness and regret is mixed with a feverish desire for doing things now, even when it's too late.

• Misleading homage to noir

  sober_gaijin2003-02-21

  Here is a film that sneaks up on you. It starts out by introducing you two three off-kilter characters--Jeff Bridges as the drifting playboy Bone; John Heard as the crippled Cutter, a man of uncompromising rage and a razor-sharp tongue; and Lisa Eichorn as the Cutter's terminally depressed wife Mo. Within the first half-hour of meeting these pathetic folk, the narrative drops in a murder mystery: a girl's body is found in a garbage can and Bone is the chief suspect. When Bone has a momentary revelation and thinks that he saw local millionaire JJ Cord disposing of the body, Cutter becomes obsessed with proving Cord's guilt. They have no evidence, you see, but as Cutter is a Vietnam vet scarred from the war and Cord represents all the "fat cats" that sent young men to 'Nam to die, Cutter thinks a little payback is in order ("He's not just anybody," Cutter growls. "He's responsible!"). After this bizarre set-up, the film takes an unusual turn. It stops being about the mystery and more about Cutter's efforts to push Bone into taking some kind of action--any action--to give his life value. In fact, the question of Cord's guilt is left hanging, and we are treated instead to a powerful climax that leaves us breathless as the screen goes black. Clearly one of my favorite films, the performance of John Heard alone is worth the price of admission. The mutilated Cutter is missing a leg, an arm and an eye, and he hobbles about swearing and growling like a drunken pirate. Some critics find Cutter offensive; I totally identified with his anger, although I felt that he took it too far at times. Nevertheless, Heard has given us one of the screen's truly memorable characters. You won't forget this film soon.

• Don Quixote At The Country Club

  manuel-pestalozzi2003-06-20

  Cutter's Way cannot be overpraised. This movie is a masterpiece of the first order. Ivan Passer, a compatriot of Milos Forman, came to the USA as an experienced Czech movie director. Not unlike Alfred Hitchcock or some German directors 30 years before him, he seems to have made a thorough analysis of the American social conditions and general manners. He then transformed his findings into movies. Two of them I know deal with New York. They are appropriately gritty. The setting of Cutter's way is a Californian beach community for the rich and beautiful – and the movie is appropriately glossy. The whole story takes place in those paradisiac locales. They are presented like an enchanted kingdom, a country of its own. Under the glossy surface, there is a darker side to the place. There is prostitution, drug abuse and murder. Cutter, living on the fringes of the enchanted kingdom, sees that more clearly than everyone else. He has his own code of chivalry by which he wants to live. He develops conspirational theories and strains to convert them into hard facts. The world around him, populated by indifferent, amoral rich and beautiful people, does not understand him, does not even want to listen, laughs at him. So Cutter mounts a white stallion and rides a charge. Repeatedly the film slips into surrealistic situations, in which the impression made on the viewers is more relevant than the storyline. This technique was well known in the forties (e.g. in film noir), present day audience are less used to it. In the earlier days of film making, surrealism was created on a soundstage, and the change between reality and "dream" became immediately clear. Passer uses real locations for situations removed from reality – a daring experiment that rewards the viewers with hauntingly beautiful pictures but might also confuse many. The director took this risk and we are rewarded with a magnificent picture about a distinguished slice of America. I predict: Cutter‘s way will one day become an honored classic.

• Unsung masterpiece, in some ways better than "Chinatown"

  tieman642012-03-02

  "What is exaggeration to one class of minds, is plain truth to another." - Dickens Perhaps the last of its kind, Ivan Passer's "Cutter's Way" is a richly allegorical post-Watergate, post-Vietnam noir. Operating as a kind of sequel to Pakula's "Parallax View", the film stars John Heard as Alex Cutter, an angry Vietnam veteran who's returned from what he now regards as a meaningless war minus an arm, an eye and a leg. The casting of Heard is significant. The actor made a trio of films, now largely forgotten, in which he played disaffected twenty-something American's, all suffering from a 1960's hangover ("Between the Lines", "Head Over Heels" etc). In "Cutter's Way" Heard pushes these characters to their extreme. He paints Cutter as a perpetual drunk, a messy tangle of counter-culture eccentricities, post Vietnam angst, bitterness and barely contained rage. He's emblematic of America's Lost Generation, high on drugs, booze and paranoid blues. The film opens on a L.A. street parade. It's an ominous black-and-white image, into which patriotic reds, whites and blues slowly seep. We then begin to coalesce on a blonde girl dancing in a white dress. She vanishes, foreshadowing a girl's murder later in the film. The figure of a man riding upon a white horse is hidden, almost imperceptibly, in the centre of this introductory image. His significance becomes apparent later on. Passer's introduction conjures up every offbeat noir from "Out of the Past" to "Blow Up" to "Parallax View". But what's intriguing about "Way" is how much it actively tries NOT to be a noir. In this regard much of the film centres on Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges, always cool), a Santa Barbara gigolo, yachtsman, beach-bum and slacker (the genesis of Jeffery Lebowski?) who we first see trimming his whiskers and flexing his brawny body over the bed of a female conquest. Passer paints Bone as Cutter's opposite: self absorbed, non committed, forever without attachments and riding through life on a wave of perpetual youth. Significantly, Bone's nickname is "Rich" and he's periodically tantalised with the prospects of an "esteemed" job; the tanks of Reaganism are on the lawn, and Bone's soul is ripe for picking. "Sooner or later you're going to have to make a decision about something," characters say, but his ears remain deaf. This is the film's underlying preoccupation: making decisions, taking a stand on something. The film's noir plot begins late. Bone witnesses a man discarding a dead girl's body. He tentatively identifies this man as J.J Cord, a powerful oil tycoon, but isn't sure. Indeed, for the purposes of the film, Cord mightn't even exist. He's a spectral figure, part archetypal noir "puppet master", part scapegoat, part State power personified. Bone wants to leave Cord alone, but Cutter latches on to the murder mystery with the ferocious tenacity of a pit-bull. These two opposite motions – yin and yang – influence Passer's aesthetic. On one hand his film's oddly relaxed, non-committed, skirting around its red herring narrative and refusing to engage its own plot, let alone acknowledge the girl's murder. On the other hand, it's at this very apathy, this "narrative slackness", which Cutter chips away (Bone plays with toy guns while the impatient Cutter blasts away with the real thing). In his quixotic quest for justice Cutter's then transformed into a one legged Ahab obsessively in pursuit of his own Moby Dick (the white whale echoing Cord's saintly white horse). But whose side do we take? Cutter shows flashes of genius, mentioning Hamlet, Moby Dick, LA history and Marx, but he's a hothead, embittered and drunk, and his judgement may be clouded. Though it is suggested that Cord murders Cutter's wife, Passer is careful to leave every act of violence ambiguous. Cord's wife, Mo, may have killed herself, their home may have been burnt by a disgruntled neighbour and not Cord, and the film's climax never resolves whether or not Cord is guilty. Are Cutter's actions radically, politically and righteously motivated, or is he deranged? In "Neon Noir" author Woody Haut argued that Vietnam not only damaged the body politic, but blurred the line between the perpetrators of crimes and those who investigated them. In "Cutter's Way", social justice has been left up to rejects, outsiders and the dregs of society. Cutter himself is plainly a visual emblem of cultural trauma (see Ashby's "Coming Home"). Interestingly, while Passer emphasises Bone's masculinity, his chiselled body, his physical perfection, it is the cripple Cutter who emerges as the film's masculine ideal. "It must be tough playing second fiddle to a one eyed cripple," Mo tells Bone. Meanwhile, Cutter attempts to force his friend out of passivity and into emotional and ideological commitment. The film then ends with Cutter and Bone holding the gun that kills (we assume) Cord, at last joined in previously denied phallic power. Hence the film's title: doing things Alex Cutter's way is doing things right, pursing a moral conviction all the way (see Altman's "The Long Goodbye"). End result: while the film registers a certain masochistic pleasure in the loss of centrality, of white privilege, its ultimate message is fairly subversive for a Hollywood noir. Wealth/power may exist beyond the reach of the ordinary, Passer says, but more importantly, change is bulldozed by escapism, non-commitment and vacillation. "I don't feel anything," Cutter's wife repeatedly states, as she drowns herself in alcohol. Her husband may have zombie limbs, but she's the zombie. By the film's end you're left with two poles: Richard "walking away is what you do best" Bone, seemingly on the fast track to a white collar wonderland, and Cutter, whose existence suggests that agency now lies only in a radical form of madness. Beyond all this, the films works equally well as a detective movie, romance and a drama about the camaraderie between a gang of castaways and would-be gumshoes. 8.9/10 – Worth two viewings.