Alan Arkin's Cooper is a playful and likable character who carries Deadhead Miles on his shoulders. A heavy burden for someone whose philosophical remarks are, for example:
"Yeah, I used to believe in Jesus. But then one night I wanted to make sure. I was getting this funny play in second gear, you know? So I took some clutch parts and I laid them under the rig and I went to sleep thinking, 'Okay, if you're Jesus you come on down, work on the clutch, maybe we talk a deal.' Next morning, all them clutch parts was gone and I was still getting that play in second gear."
This he says to Paul Benedict's Hitchhiker while Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah plays on the drive-in screen. He has what you might call Southern charm, very much like Kit it Badlands. The movie, infused with road scenery, snapshots of lifestyles and attitudes encountered en route, and always with folk music on the soundtrack, fits in its time. You could double-feature it with Schatzberg's Scarecrow.
The comedy is well-constructed and often works. Screenwriter Terrence Malick allows moments of curiosity (a woman tied to a stove by a long rope affixed to a belt around her waist), the supernatural (the legend of Johnny Mesquitero), the ridiculous, and zany. Cooper, again like Kit, stumbles through his unplanned and wayward journey with a large degree of indifference.
"You know, you're not going to believe this, but I saw Ethel Merman once at a state fair. In Kansas. 'Bout four years ago. She came out there, sang a song: four bars through it a hog, a hundred yards away, fell down dead on its side. I swear that's the God's truth."
At its best the film evokes the strangeness and absurdity of living and being human. The lack of a central theme sometimes causes the energy to dip. As the hitchhiker comments, "It's as interesting as you are interested."
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