The Sweet Ride

SMALL films creep weekly in-and-out of Washington Street's huge movie palaces, one-time legitimate theatres whose vaudeville slates still hang adjacent to the vast screens now lit dimly by the beam of a projector hundreds of yards away. Here play the films which last only seven days, the product that changes each Wednesday, supplied by a distribute who senses vaguely that the theatrical release of Robert Wagner films is a hollow formality prior to a greater pay-off of television sale and a nationwide screening on Saturday Night at the Movies. And when we sit in the half-light of these theatres, distracted by candy-laden children in action in too many aisles, wondering what evil lurks in the hearts of men who throw a sign saying ARS GRATIA ARTIS in front of a motorpsycho surfing shocker, we can grasp something of the apathy and despair that has permeated every aspect of Hollywood film production.

But now and again a good one comes along. Bathed in innocence, making mistakes as though they had never been made before, Harvey Hart's The Sweet Ride exists in passive limbo between art and product and, like Blow-Up, reminds us how much can be created from a skeletal dramatic narrative. Its surf, cycle, and psychedelic setting is seldom exploited as such, and even the semi-mystery which motivates the plot is largely abandoned in favor of extended description of a bittersweet life-style gone slightly out of hand. The Sweet Ride tries to beat the trappings of its own genre by being a little better. It is, and its inevitable disappearance on Wednesday should not go entirely unnoticed, nor should we necessarily ignore the Orpheum's next seven-day double-bill. Note that the B picture is not dead, that genre melodrama is still capable of quiet surprise or some intelligence, that small cinematic pleasures often lie where we least suspect them, then that it's good to take chances trying to find them.