My Year Of Flops Case File #18: The Chase
Arthur Penn's bizarro 1965 thriller Mickey One had the misfortune of originating in the wrong country at the wrong time. If Penn's black-comic homage to the French New Wave and Film Noir had been released in France it would have fit right in with the cinematic revolution instigated by the Cahiers Du Cinema crowd. If it had hit American studios a decade later American audiences would undoubtedly have been more indulgent towards its arty weirdness.
Instead Mickey One died an unmourned death with critics and audiences alike. By the time Penn directed 1967's Bonnie & Clyde a counter-cultural revolution had primed audiences for its radical reinvention of the gangster movie. In between the two movies Penn struck out with 1966's The Chase, a relic of a bygone era when desperate studios fatally out of step with the times threw money at prominent theatrical and literary properties in a doomed attempt to stave off obsolescence.
The Chase consequently boasts a formidable pedigree on all fronts. It was adapted–in theory at least–by Lillian Hellman from Horton Foote's novel and play though it was reportedly taken out of Hellman's hands early and rewritten extensively. The legendary Sam Spiegel produced and Penn had already developed an impressive reputation thanks to his television work and films like The Miracle Worker. Then there's the cast: Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall, James Fox, Angie Dickinson, E.G Marshall and even a young Paul Williams, who looks disconcertingly like a lesbian midget in one of his earliest roles. With all that going for it how could The Chase possibly fail? Then again with the sky-high expectations that come with that level of talent how could The Chase possibly succeed?
The Chase takes place in one of those hot-blooded small Southern towns where long-simmering resentments constitutes the local growth industry and business is booming. It's a town where everything is for sale, especially people and sex. Marlon Brando stalks forthrightly through this cesspool of sin and moral degradation as a sheriff looking to recapture the parts of his soul that haven't been fatally compromised through his relationship with town patriarch E.G Marshall, a character actor I suspect emerged out of the womb a middle-aged, faintly malevolent authority figure.