Wall of Paul

Bridges is Richard Bone, a yacht salesman/gigolo living in Santa Barbara, CA. Bone is laconically tanned-and-sexy enough to get away with basically anything he wants to do, so long as the stakes aren’t high. The only stance he really commits to is non-commitment; walking away, as his friend, Alex Cutter, loves to point out, is Bone’s specialty. But that will change.

Heard is Cutter, Bone’s personal albatross. Years earlier, while Bone stayed at home banging cheerleaders, Cutter was shipped off to Vietnam, where he lost an eye, a leg, an arm, and any illusions about where his life was heading. Cutter is a belligerent drunk who loves to verbally bait people until they’re ready to explode. Then he backs off from the confrontation and hides behind his war wounds. His wife, Mo (Eichhorn), is beautiful but wasted, forever sprawled in a worn bathrobe, swilling from a bottle of vodka to drown out her husband’s overwhelming contempt for everything. Including her. Bone may well be in love with Mo. But he’s not about to say it out loud, and Mo is too beaten-down to care anyway.

One night during a torrential downpour, Bone witnesses a shadowy image that turns out to be a man – somebody – disposing of the body of a young girl who was brutally raped and murdered. The next day, during a parade that's teeming with local big-wigs, Bone suddenly thinks he recognizes the man he saw the night before, and points him out to Cutter. Cutter identifies the guy as J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott) an untouchable industrialist who owns and runs half the town.

Although Bone quickly backs off from his contention that Cord is the killer, Cutter will have none of it- that guy is the exact type of S.O.B. who sent him off to fight a no-win war, only to abandon him when he returned to the states a shattered man. Cutter won’t rest until he nails Cord, either through blackmail or something more suitably violent. And Bone, out of loyalty to his apparently delusional friend, pretends to go along for the ride. Eventually, there will be no room for pretending.

Cutter is such a self-righteous blowhard, Heard has no choice but to edge toward growling parody. But the performances here are note-perfect. If there’s any God (let's have a show of hands) Bridges will one day receive the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. When he does, everyone will suddenly realize that he’s been one of the most consistently powerful American actors of the past 30 years.

But Eichhorn supplies the real dazzle in “Cutter’s Way.” Her quietly heartbreaking work as the wilted beauty, Mo, deserved an Academy Award nomination, if not an outright win. But you can’t win an Oscar if nobody sees your movie. “Cutter’s Way” did virtually no business when it was originally released, and United Artists was so confused about what they had on their hands, they couldn’t even decide what to call it. The studio first opted for “Cutter and Bone,” which is the title of the Newton Thornburg novel that the film is based on. When the picture flopped, they withdrew it, re-titled it “Cutter’s Way,” and promptly promoted it just as badly as they did the first time around.

Then, as it must to all misunderstood movies, death came to “Cutter’s Way.”

That was a tragedy, since this picture is arguably the final salvo of what, by now, is widely regarded to be the single most fertile era of commercial American filmmaking. The shorthand for this sort of thing is to say that the Movie Brat period began with “Easy Rider” (faux-heavy as it is, man) in 1969, and ended with “Raging Bull” (“Bring it over- it’s like charcoal!!”) in 1980. But Passer’s film has all the earmarks of many other masterful pictures from that exalted period, including an intense, un-photogenic anti-hero, crackerjack dialogue (courtesy of screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin), nothing-fancy shot sequences, and a general disdain for all-American business as usual.

Passer may be Czechoslovakian, but, much as his fellow Czech, Milos Forman, did with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he captures a particularly American type of rage in “Cutter’s Way”- the kind that says someone at the top eventually has to pay, even if you’re not sure you’ve got the right person. The characters in “Cutter’s Way,” detritus that they are, reach for the last thing that will make their voices heard above the roar of the American Dream. And it turns out to be a gun. How many times have you read that one in the newspaper in the past year?

- Paul Tatara