Straight Time (1978)

i must have seen a different film!!

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Ulu Grosbard was one of the great American directors of the seventies and was certainly among the most underrated. He made "Straight Time" in 1978 and it's a terrific movie about crime and criminals though it's not a thriller nor even a heist movie. It's central character, Max Dembo, (a superb Dustin Hoffman), is a career criminal; crime is built into his DNA. When he's released from prison, where he's served 6 years for armed robbery, he at first seems repentant but it isn't long before he has a run-in with his unsympathetic and vindictive parole officer, (M. Emmett Walsh, excellent). From this point on, it's all downhill.Were this film in French you wouldn't think twice in saying it was a Jean-Pierre Melville picture. Like Melville's work this film deals in criminal mindsets; it's about the minutiae of crime. Dembo and his associates are professional criminals but they are messy and arrogant, more likely to die an early death or spend more time in prison than out of it.This is a beautifully acted, highly intelligent picture. Others in the cast include Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton and Gary Busey, brilliant as a young would-be gangster not making much of a job of trying to stay on the straight and narrow. Adapted from the novel "No Beast so Fierce" by Edward Bunker, who also appears as another criminal, and beautifully photographed by Owen Roizman it really deserves to be better known.

Very realistic crime movie, based on No Beast So Fierce, the first book by Eddie Bunker, whom you probably know as Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs. Bunker was a career criminal with an impressive track record: he was San Quentin's youngest inmate ever and made it all the way to the FBI's most wanted list in the early seventies. During his last stay in prison he wrote No Beast So Fierce, about an ex-convict named Max Dembo, who has a hard time adjusting on the outside. According to Bunker, No Beast So Fierce is supposed to show that most ex-cons who go back to a life of crime don't choose to do so. They're forced by the system and the circumstances. Well, I haven't read the book, but in Straight Time the reason for Max Dembo's inevitable return to crime lies mostly in his character, not in the system. Sure, his parole officer (a superb M. Emmett Walsh) is a complete asshole. But who hasn't had an asshole for a boss? We take the abuse and move on. But not Max Dembo. He just can't. Too proud, too stubborn, too ill adjusted to civilian life. When Dembo attacks his parole officer and there is no way back for him, we see not only panic in his eyes but also relief. His attitude changes as well: while he was clearly uncomfortable trying to adjust to life outside, he is quite resolute and efficient as soon as he is back doing the things he does best, which is robbing banks. It's a great role for Hoffman who had Bunker and another ex-convict called John Carlen advise him throughout the production. That probably added to the realism of this great crime film. In most movies about bank robbers, the criminals are mostly outsiders by choice, with their own set of principles. Straight Time is no different. But unlike The Getaway or Charley Varrick, this one shows us the very tragic consequences of that life.

Wow, I am reading all the glowing reviews and I am completely flummoxed. This film just did not take me to the place. Try as I did, I just couldn't imagine Hoffman as a true 'tough guy'. Maybe it's my familiarity with his person but all I could see was a soft spoken, intellectual type of guy trying to act tough. Didn't work. The parole officer M. Emmet Walsh, who typically comes across as cartoonish in films, ends up tied to a fence sans pants. Really? The scene is so unreal in a film that tries desperately to be real. Two key roles, friend Jerry and friend Willy never really get developed. Why is a fellow criminal such as Willy so incompetent. And why would Jerry risk so much when Max is also time and again shown to be incompetent at crime. Hoffman is miscast. Screenplay is porous and predictable.

Little seen late 70's Dustin Hoffman film which I was pleased to catch airing on TCM and which shows its star was more than up to the "challenge" of playing "street", a la the younger competition De Niro and Pacino in a tough urban tale of a small-time thief released back into society but who drifts back to crime with disastrous results.The film moves us deftly through the key relationships that Hoffman's Max Dembo character enters, which all inform the narrative, starting with his petty tyrannical parole officer M Emmet Walsh, strung-out driver/buddy Gary Busey, young female interest Thelma Russell and cut-from-the-same-cloth fellow hoodlum Harry Dean Stanton, none of whom really profit from the experience (Busey & Stanton in particular!) before he heads out on the run to L.A., all chance of a "normal" life blown to bits.Looking a little Latino with his handlebar moustache, I've rarely seen Hoffman act better than this and it's something of a revelation seeing him here on top of his game given how much he's mellowed into his avuncular old age in recent years. He captures the edginess and essential loneliness of his character, erupting into rage when pushed just too far but just about capable of tenderness with the hero-worshipping Russell. His return to old ways starts small but inevitably builds up to violence and murder as his life spirals out of control.The film readily captures the mundaneness of Hoffman's ill-fated attempts to fit back into society and these are contrasted well with the action set pieces. The four main supporting roles mentioned above are all excellently played, by Walsh, Busey, Russell and Stanton and there's no time in the film when you don't believe you're seeing real-life characters. What humour there is, is sparing and grim, (it's doubtful that pesky parole officer will be able to hold his head up again in public, for one thing) and there's also a fluid, sympathetic musical soundtrack too to maintain interest, with themes a little reminiscent at times of "Midnight Cowboy".I didn't quite accept however the phot-montage ending which seemed to indicate that Dembo always was the proverbial leopard unable to change his spots from youth, as with the right breaks, one has to hope in modern society that offenders released back into the community can be rehabilitated.As an indictment of the U.S. parole system of the time however, this gritty, uncompromising movie makes its point effectively and further confirms me in the belief that the genre of Hollywood 70's contemporary drama was a rich one indeed.