Go Home, Red Ryder

WHEN YOU COMING BACK, RED RYDER is a showcase for Marjoe Gortner. It shares much with the movie that introduced him. In the documentary Marjoe Gortner exposed himself as a rip-off travelling evangelist who gloated as he fleeced his followers. His sexual energy and charisma invited comparisons with Mick Jagger. Blue-haired dowagers fainted at his feet.

Now, in When You Coming Back, Red Ryder, Gortner plays a crazed Vietnam vet who terrorizes a bunch of people in a New Mexico diner in 1968. Both the time frame and the tripped-out pomposity bring to mind the sixties marijuana generation. Background music is provided by the likes of B.B. King and Tammy Wynette, and I kept thinking of those late-night stoned raves in which you immortalize your first love affair on film in your head and try to match its moments to your favorite songs: "And then, after our fourth fight, when I'm crossing Boylston Street and I see him I'd play 'Walk On By'...Brilliant"

Much of When You Coming Back Red Ryder is amateurish in just this sense. Brilliant analyses of the universe hatched in the wee hours pale by day. The movie is full of cloddishly conceived ideas which could have brilliant if any one of them had been followed through in a disciplined way.

The movie opens with a desert landscape and an ear-splitting blast of electronic music. Teddy (Gortner) and girlfriend Cheryl (Candy Clark) are waiting for a cocaine connection. Teddy makes Cheryl hide behind a rock. Two Mexicans appear and Teddy successfully robs them of both the cocaine and their guns by being quicker on the draw. As soon as they disappear, Cheryl jumps out of her hiding place screaming, "Jesus Christ! You scared the shit out of me! You shot at those men! Jesus Christ!" He sits chuckling at her, lets her rave for a while and then makes everything all right with a kiss and a feel.

Later, at the border, by playing smart-ass and declaring his cocaine, which the guards search for in vain, he subjects both himself and Cheryl to the legendary orifice check. We are treated to a shot of Marjoe with a proctoscope up his ass discussing Nixon and Vietnam with the doctor. Heavy. Later, he drives his microbus (decorated with a U.S. flag on the side and an eagle on the front, heavy again) over the boarder with Cheryl silently weeping in humiliation beside him.

Eventually they end up at a diner, where Teddy slowly takes control of all the people and subjects each of them to similar humiliations. Comparison with The Petrified Forest is inevitable. As in that movie, most of the action takes place in one room, in which a group of diverse types is held hostage by one violent man. Both are set in roadside cafes in the Southwest. But many of the elements which made The Petrified Forest a great film are missing in Red Ryder. The most important of these is restraint. Bogey was actually at his hammiest in Petrified Forest, but he communicated with the economy of a professional. Gortner's performance, for all its Bacchanalian intensity, lacks just this sort of professionalism. We cannot help but admire his characterization. Half demented encounter group leader, half psychotic drill sergeant, he strips people naked with a sentence. He tells the fat adolescent waitress nobody will marry her. He calls her macho greaser heart-throb, Red Ryder, a fairy. He calls the bluff of an effete, narcissitic New Yorker and waves his wife's priceless violin around threatening to smash it if she doesn't do his bid ding. When the husband tries to come to her aid he shoots him in the arm.

Through all this, the pace never varies. We are treated to cliche camera work (fading back and forth between blurred background and foreground figures, over the shoulder shots into mirrors) and cliche background music (B.B. King singing "The Thrill Is Gone" as the violinist lies bored during her husband's lovemaking). Lee Grant, as the violinist, wears clothes out of the seventies.

All the characters except Gortner's are themselves cliches; the unsatisfied wife, the frustrated greaser, the fat waitress, the nice-guy motel-keeper. The characters line up almost exactly like those in The Petrified Forest, but in that film they were three-dimensional. In Red Ryder the characters are all foils for Teddy's contempt. None of them are allowed to do anything but whimper or get hysterical. When Red Ryder finally goes after Teddy and shoots him down, the film has already lost us. The final act of bravery, unlike Leslie Howard's in Petrified Forest, makes little impact, because we have had no glimpse of strength in the character until that moment. The scene in which Red kills Teddy has more cliches, another slow-motion, gut-spilling ballet to add to the files. It is arbitrary, just as it is arbitrary that when Red rides out of town in his new car, he comes back for the fat waitress whom he's treated with contempt throughout the film. The movie turns from sadistic to sappy within minutes; the plot has no inner logic.

In the end the audience is like the helpless group trapped in the diner, and is treated with equal contempt. Messages are pounded into us without letup--the Vietnam generation turning its violence back on America, the helplessness of women (who do nothing but tremble and bawl, and like Cheryl repeat 90 times, "I'm scared"), the arrogance of power, the sadism built into our society. We are supposed to sit there mesmerized and say, "Gee, I never thought of that," as if we haven't been thinking all these things for a long time. It is no longer enough merely to throw such ideas into the air; it is necessary to say something about them.

One lesson to be learned from this film is that a good preacher is not necessarily a good actor. Gortner has great presence. With a good director and a little humility he might learn to act. The movie itself is pretensious and insulting to its audience. It promises a lot but delivers a confused mishmash, a midnight stoned rave on film.