Chase, The (1966)

Just before Arthur Penn would change the landscape of the American film industry forever with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he directed The Chase.

Derided at the time as an old-style Peyton Place-like potboiler, what critics failed to realise was that this was as stark a depiction of violence as had ever appeared on the American screen.

A Lillian Hellman adaptation of a Horton Foote novel, Penn’s first masterpiece is also one of his darkest works, a Southern Gothic portrait of small-town America as a festering backwater, stagnant with avarice, jealousy, and racism.

Marlon Brando, in one of his great mid-period roles, is magnificent as benevolent Sheriff Calder, reluctantly assigned by local kingpin Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall) to capture local boy made bad Bubber Reeves (played by future New Hollywood star Robert Redford), who has escaped from jail and is on his way home to Tarl County, Texas.

Bubber’s imminent return to his hometown rouses hostility among the citizens of Tarl, such as Edwin Stewart (Robert Duvall), who believes Bubber will come after him to settle an old score, and Damon Puller (Richard Bradford), who, between grope sessions with Edwin’s wife Emily (Janice Rule), uses Bubber as an excuse to terrorise black residents.

As the atmosphere heats up, Calder wants to keep Bubber alive, and he convinces Bubber’s wife, Anna (Jane Fonda), and her lover, Val’s son, Jake (James Fox), to find Bubber and coax him into surrender.

Val’s fear that Bubber will kill his son, however, sparks a long confrontation that leaves rational law and order pummeled into the ground by the town’s ignorant cruelty.

In one sense, Hellman’s script is like an updated Western; in another, it evokes the madness and violence that gripped America in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.

Although Penn virtually disowned the picture after producer Sam Spiegel had it re-edited, it remains a genuinely disturbing evocation of that traumatic era and an explosive drama of one man’s fight to cling to what he knows to be right.

Sheriff Calder
Marlon Brando
Bubber Reeves
Robert Redford
Anna Reeves
Jane Fonda
Val Rogers
E G Marshall
Jake Rogers
James Fox
Ruby Calder
Angie Dickinson
Damon Fuller
Richard Bradford
Emily Stewart
Janice Rule
Edwin Stewart
Robert Duvall
Mrs Reeves
Miriam Hopkins
Mary Fuller
Martha Hyer
Elizabeth Rogers
Diana Hyland
Briggs
Henry Hull
Mrs Briggs
Jocelyn Brando

Director
Arthur Penn

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