Straight Time (1978)

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Major Disappointment

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

One of my favorite crime films is an engrossing gritty depiction of the life of an ex-con (not that I'm a real expert on the subject, but it seemed realistic to me). The film opens with Dustin Hoffman playing a greasy haired lowlife just released from prison, having to check in with his sleazy parole office, the great M. Emmet Walsh, looking for a job, but having trouble since he has a record, though he does con his way into the life of a pretty girl, the under appreciated Theresa Russell. Hoffman tries to go straight for a bit, but he doesn't try all that that hard before he slips back into a life of crime, pulling jobs with his equally scuzzy friend Harry Dean Stanton. What's most striking and memorable about "Straight Time" is how realistic the film feels. Sure lots of film have presented unglamorous depictions of a life of crime, but "Straight Time" does more than that. The script was based on a novel from real-life career criminal Edward Bunker, who later became a respected Hollywood script doctor and screenwriter. Besides Bunker, the script was also worked on by Jeffrey Boam ("The Dead Zone" "Innerspace" "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"), Alvin Sargent ("Ordinary People," "Paper Moon," and even the recent Spider-Man films), and uncredited work by Michael Mann ("Miami Vice," "Heat," "Collateral"). The script is filled with wonderful small moments that you rarely see in crime films prior to this, such as Hoffman telling a junkie friend that his shooting up in front of him could put him away, or Hoffman casing a jewelry store with his unwitting girlfriend as cover, or a burglary scene where Hoffman bypasses a pawn shop's alarm by breaking into the store next door and busting a hole in the wall to steal pawn shop guns. The films filled with these sorts of moments that give it an authenticity that's missing from most standard of crime films. Another huge asset of the film is it's cast. Besides the above mentioned Hoffman, Russell, Walsh, and Stanton, you also have strong a strong performance by Gary Busey as Hoffman's junkie friend and most surprising of all is a young Kathy Bates playing Busey's wife, who's trying to raise a family and also trying to keep her husband on the straight and narrow, away from the criminal influence she knows Hoffman brings. Bates only has a few scenes, but leaves a strong impression on the audience as likely the most identifiable "normal" character in the film. Her most memorable scene is when Hoffman visits her and Busey and their family, when at one point she has Hoffman alone in their kitchen and tries to very nicely tell him to not come around anymore. Writer Edward Bunker also shows up in one scene as a sleazy low life character. Directed by Ulu Grosbard, the film has a wonderfully gritty feel for this lurid story of low level street criminals. While most crime films of this era focused on "professional" criminals, films such as "Prime Cut," "Charley Varrick," "The Outfit," or even "The French Connection" (which are all great films), "Straight Time" presented a unique window in the life of real criminals. Watching this film now in 2018, there's also a retro charm to the film, from Hoffman's huge sideburns, to Russell's awesome 70s outfits, to the cars, to the quaint lack of technology, which now all seems super cool, even if it was probably quite the opposite at the time of the film's original release. It's also pretty clear that "Straight Time" was an influence on "Reservoir Dogs," particularly the jewelry store robbery that's never shown in Dogs, but is shown in this film; not to mention Bunker having a small role in "Reservoir Dogs" as Mr. Blue. With music by David Shire and cinematography by Owen Roizman ("Tootsie," "The Exorcist," "The French Connection"), "Straight Time" is an American Film classic of the first order that deserves more recognition than it's been given.

. . . American womenfolk against the Real Life threats posed by its lead actor? Some people will view STRAIGHT TIME as only that, seeing as how the beleaguered Dustin Hoffman's "Max Dembow" character man-handles the soft-hearted "Jenny," after drinking directly from the quart carton of milk in her refrigerator and just before stealing her baby blue Mustang convertible. An actor who would agree to play a misogynist doing all of this surely has a screw loose; no one would trust such a jerk with their own daughter in Real Life. However, many perceptive viewers have realized that Warner Bros. is extending a warning to we folks of the future that the white female voting demographic--such as STRAIGHT TIME's Jenny--cannot be trusted at the ballot box. In a country that has given this group Title IX, Choice, and ObamaCare, most of them will gravitate to the Max-like "bad boy" (the worse the better) in preference to one of their own, such as Elizabeth Warren, Jane Fonda, or Hillary Clinton. Just wait, Warner warns the USA, if you continue with this trial run of "Women's Suffrage," you'll surely wind up with a president like Hoffman, if not a twice-divorced self-proclaimed serial finger-raping paycheck welsher tax cheat Russian spy.

"Straight Time" demonstrates why the decade of the 1970s was one of the greatest in American cinema. The film was an indie project spearheaded by Dustin Hoffman, who was intending to direct the film, but passed the directorial chores on to Ulu Grosbard.From start to finish, there is a gritty realism in the film locations from the tawdry bars to the dowdy employment referral agency to the slovenly apartment to the prison scenes. The one contrasting scenic location was the sunny, cheerful, and sparkling apartment of Jenny, Max Dembo's erstwhile girlfriend.There is a scene where Dembo observes the sense of permanency apparent in Jenny's apartment. That feeling has undoubtedly been an absent commodity in the life of the convict. Of course, Dembo craves the comfort of that nurturing environment. But the film makes clear that he craves the thrill of crime more than the stable relationship that Jenny offers him.The secondary roles are well-crafted and superbly performed by M. Emmet Walsh as the sleazy parole officer; Theresa Russell as the naive Jenny who seems surprised that she is attracted to Dembo; Gary Busey as Willy, the drug-addicted friend of Dembo; Kathy Bates as the fiercely protective wife of Willy; and Harry Dean Stanton as Dembo's partner in crime, Jerry. There is an unforgettable moment when relaxing in the backyard of his suburban home in the San Fernando valley, Jerry starts strumming a guitar and singing a C&W song, then casually asserting that he is desperate to get out of that world and return to a life of crime.If "Straight Time" were made today, it would surpass almost any mainstream Hollywood film in acting, screenplay, atmosphere, and indepth character portraits. But in the "golden age" of the 1970s, it was only one example of gritty, realistic filmmaking at its finest.

. . . were no longer Kool by the late 1970s, Warner Bros. tells us with STRAIGHT TIME. No matter how "sexy" it seemed for Bette Davis and Paul Henreid to share their "coffin nails" in the 1940s during NOW, VOYAGER, Warner uses STRAIGHT TIME to tell America that it's high time to wake up and sniff the turpentine! Couples such as Dustin Hoffman and Theresa Russell who chain-smoke together are seen as an out-and-out Cancer upon American Society. Demon Nicotine drives career criminal Hoffman from Armed Robbery to Kidnapping to Grand Theft Auto to Bank and Jewelry Heists to Serial Murder to Cop-Killing, with a few Sex Crimes thrown in for good measure. The amoral Ms. Russell catches a touch of Hoffman's tobacco-fueled Terrorist Tendencies from his seductive second-hand smoke, and she gives up on Life as she recognizes that her Pre-existing Joe Camel Humping-Habit has left her lungs and other vital organs too damaged to contemplate having kids or ever seeing the advanced age of 40. Unlike the earlier BONNIE AND CLYDE or the later NATURAL BORN KILLERS, there is not a moment of humor or style breaking through the unremitting smoggy pall exuded here by Hoffman, Russell, and the rest of their smoking-like-burning-vacant-fields milieu. Warner rightly keeps the sheer boredom of this parasitical dead-end loathsomeness at the forefront here, in a movie that could have been more aptly titled STRAIGHT TALK.