Cutter's Way

From the sweetness of Intimate Lighting to the bitterness of Cutter’s Way is a very long way to go. Czech filmmaker Ivan Passer defected to the West with his friend Milos Forman in 1969. Eventually, Forman found his niche and found success. But Passer never did. He made a remarkable film in 1971 about drug addicts in New York called Born To Win. Ten years later he was brought on board to direct Cutter’s Way, after the initial project fell through. It’s one of those films redolent of the time when it was made that failed to find the audience it deserved. In the nearly 40 years since, its reputation has grown considerably. A recent Guardian article called it a masterpiece, while another claimed it could’ve been made today, given its deeply pessimistic tone. I googled noir and the first thing that popped up was this: “a genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity.” Cutter’s Way is, from the outset, a film about how two powerless men try to bring an otherwise untouchable pillar of society, whom they are convinced is guilty of murder, to justice. But its manner of proceeding to its messy conclusion (the film blacks out with a gunshot) is what sets the film apart. Along with its beautifully delineated characters and exceptional casting. 

In the New York Times Vincent Canby complained that it didn’t conform to any recognizable genre: “As it is, [Passer] seems to be bent on establishing his own genre -throwaway movies of mystery, espionage and sometimes black comedy, movies full of occasionally remarkable sequences that ultimately add up to zero.” As genres go, Cutter’s Way is about as noir as you can get this side of a tragedy. But it becomes pretty clear that even at its murkiest, Ivan Passer was aiming at something deeper. Even if you’re looking for some kind of metaphor of the particular moment in which the film was made. 

Alex Cutter is a disabled Vietnam veteran who lives with his wife, Maureen ("Mo"), in a house in a run-down neighborhood of Santa Barbara, California. He spends his time holding court with his cronies at a neighborhood bar. Richard Bone is a beach bum who functions as a stud to wealthy women he encounters in local clubs. He is somehow a friend of Alex’s and he’s in love with Alex’s wife, but has never acted on it. 

One night during the city’s “Spanish Days” festival, Bone's rickety green Austin Healy breaks down in an alley. A large sedan pulls up behind his Healy, and behind the headlights’ glare, the driver gets out, pulls something out of the passenger side and drops it in a nearby dumpster. Showing himself in the headlights of the sedan, Bone is nearly run over as it speeds past him. It begins to rain as he turns up his collar and walks away. The camera shows us – but not Bone – what was deposited in the dumpster: a woman’s body, legs sticking out still wearing stiletto heels. 

Bone finds Cutter in the bar, but leaves him there when he starts a fight, driving his car home. Next morning two garbage men find the body in the dumpster – and the green Healy. The cops show up at Cutter’s door. At the station Bone meets Valerie Duran, the sister of the victim (a 17-year-old cheerleader). Bone tells the detective what he saw, but says he didn’t see the man’s face. 

Watching the parade with Cutter and Mo, Bone sees an older man riding a white horse and recognizes him as the man driving the sedan. The rider is J. J. Cord, a wealthy tycoon who also employs Cutter’s half brother, George Swanson. Cutter and Bone, along with Valerie, hatch a plot to expose Cord as the murderer, but make it appear to be blackmail. 

On this solid foundation, novelist Newton Thornburg constructed a good thriller, Cutter and Bone, that was published in 1976. It reflected the malaise in America following Vietnam and Watergate - the prevailing pessimism that lasted long enough to give Ivan Passer’s film it’s deeply dark atmosphere. A speech by Cutter to Bone is indicative: 

While you were getting laid in the Ivy League I was getting my ass shot up. Don’t give me lectures on morality. In fact, let me give you one. I watched the war on TV just like everyone else, okay? Thought the same damn things. You know, what you thought when you saw a picture of a young woman with a baby lying face down in a ditch. Two gooks. You had three reactions, Rich. Same as everybody else. First one was real easy. I hate the United States of America. Yeah. You see the same damn thing the next day and you move up a notch. There is no God. But you know what you finally say, what everybody finally says. No matter what. I'm hungry. I'm hungry, Rich. I'm fuckin' starved. 

Bone: So you pick out somebody you blackmail him. 

Cutter: I didn't pick him out, you did. And he isn't somebody. He's responsible. 

Bone: For the girl? 

Cutter: For everything. Him an all the motherfuckers in the world just like him. They’re all the same. 

Bone: So let’s blow up AT&T, eh? 

Cutter: You know why they’re all the same, Rich? Because it’s never their ass that’s on the line. Never. It’s always somebody else’s. Always yours, mine, ours. So leave off the morality, ok? 

Cutter is made unforgettable by John Heard. The makeup and camera angles make his missing left forearm and half of his left leg convincing. But Heard makes the man’s bitterness both funny and heartbreaking. Jeff Bridges is beautiful as a gigolo who carries a torch for Cutter’s wife, Mo. He’s aware that he possesses the certain something that turns women’s heads, but he’s no longer comfortable with it. You can tell he only puts up with Cutter to be near Mo. And Lisa Eichhorn makes Mo a haunting presence in the film, spending half of her time on screen in the midst of an neverending bender. When she finally succumbs to Bone’s importunities, she weeps the whole time, as if it’s been too long or that it’s just too late for her. Her death in a house fire is a painful moment in the film. Cutter asks to see what’s left of her in the morgue and when the man unzips the translucent bag (what’s inside is a charred mass), Cutter touches a part of it and says to the man, “Mo.” I liked the way Passer uses a white horse as a leitmotiv throughout the film. Mo tells Bone that, any day now, a knight on a white horse will arrive and take her away from her sad life. As he prepares to confront J. J. Cord, putting a pistol in his pocket, Cutter tells Mo, “Some day in Tahiti we’ll look back on all this and – laugh.” Nobody made it to Tahiti. 

I have admired Cutter’s Way ever since I first saw it some time in the 80s. But I think it deserved neither the cool reception it got on its first release, nor the always backhanded celebration lavished on it since then. As Robert Redford said to Barbara Walters when she told him, after The Way We Were came out, that he could have any woman he wanted, “Where were they when I needed them?”