D: Gary Grillo. P: Jack Lucarelli, Jameson Parker. W: Dennis
A. Pratt. Ph: Steve Yaconelli. M: Paul Chihara. St: Wilford Brimley (Sheriff
Lawrence Mitchell), Jack Lucarelli (Joe Case), Gerald McRaney (Jake Wheeler), Jameson
Parker (Dave Buchanan), Jeannie Wilson (Jess Buchanan)
“If that girl had blonde hair and blue eyes, half the
state police would be down here”
Odd,
then, that in the midst of its run they chose for their theatrical debut a bleak,
violent, western-style drama about people trafficking and police corruption.[i]
Parker and McRaney play good cop-bad cop in Arizona, while Lucarelli’s
out-of-towner, an ex-LA lawman and Parker’s best friend, vows to expose McRaney
for the murder of a wetback girl. Brimley, notionally the star, plays a sheriff
on the take, his lethargy on the case a symptom of his culpability in McRaney’s
infernal affairs.
On
the surface (and Jackals rarely digs
much deeper), this looks much like a telefilm, directed by a TV specialist whose
static camera setups make even the desert locations seem cramped.
Characterisations are similarly shallow (a flashback is thrown in to give Lucarelli
a little more substance), and the complexity of the issue simplified almost to the
level of white hats and black hats, such that the denouement embraces fully the
lone-justice credo beloved of the B-western.
Taken
on its own terms, however, Jackals packs
a hefty punch, holding its own among a slew of contemporaneous wetback-smuggling
movies, from the starrier Borderline
and The Border (Bronson and
Nicholson, respectively) to Border Cop,
with Telly Savalas, and the flimsy Border
Heat. Given a straightforward brief, Grillo adheres to it rigidly. His approach
may be functional, but it has the merit of bypassing the kind of knotty
tangents that almost throttled the more ambitious The Border. Of course, one can extrapolate from Jackals’ microcosmic small-town milieu, its
distaste for McRaney’s alpha-male machismo and the exploitation of the
vulnerable, but it suffices without a subtext, too, as a leanly plotted,
adeptly crafted melange of genres.
The
sense of a western in modern garb builds inexorably, the wider world receding
as Parker and Lucarelli pursue McRaney and his minions across the border for a bloody,
superbly staged nocturnal shootout, viscerally reminiscent of the climax of Rolling Thunder. Given the identity of
the opponents, this sequence must have been a distressing experience for fans
of Simon & Simon.
Most
of the cast play with purpose if not vigour. Of the principals, Lucarelli,
another TV actor, channels the moral outrage that has attended films on this
theme since Anthony Mann’s Border
Incident. He takes on the ‘man’s gotta do’ duties without recourse to chest-puffing
forthrightness – hallmark of many an Eighties action film.[ii] The
acting laurels belong to McRaney. Most famous in the US for his grouchy title
role in Nineties sitcom Major Dad, he
is both domineering and intimidating, simmering with arrogance as a deputy
sheriff much given to murder, brutalising women and spitting tobacco juice.
It’s
likely a director with a genuinely wide-screen vision could have made Jackals a more substantial proposition,
developed its plot and characters to their potential. (One feels Walter Hill
would have run riot with this material.) Yet for all his limitations, Grillo assembled
the constituent parts efficiently, not least the action scenes: tightly choreographed
slow-motion gunplay; a chase that begins on four wheels, weaving among the
rusting hulks of aeroplanes in a salvage yard, and ends up on foot. Parker and
Lucarelli lose their man as he slips over the border, beyond their jurisdiction
– an inconvenience that will not deter them for long.
Jackals’ subject matter was certainly topical (and remains so in today’s Trumped-up political atmosphere). Yet in the desperate actions of its heroes – and its villain, for that matter – can be discerned something more timeless, a tenet of innumerable westerns summed up in the end-titles song: “Sometimes a man may not know, just how far he can go.” Kevin Grant
[i] The title Jackals – a
term used for gangs of people smugglers – was exchanged for American Justice for US distribution,
but retained for overseas prints, where the film went straight to VHS. In the
US it was granted only a limited theatrical run
[ii] Lucarelli made a few appearances in Simon
& Simon and recently had a small role in Django Unchained. He is married to Jeannie Wilson, here playing
Parker’s wife
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