SHACK OUT ON 101, Edward Dein's 1955 minimalist masterpiece of Cold War weirdness remains, over 50 years later, one of Hollywood's strangest concoctions.
A dilapidated seaside beanery just north of San Diego is the setting for this outré noir tale about a group of disparate folks who become either directly or peripherally involved with Commie spies and stolen microfilm. The unforgettable cast includes Keenan Wynn as the diner's proprietor, a man obsessed with his "pecs" and always at odds with Lee Marvin as Slob, the animalistic short-order cook who's obsessed with va-va-voom Terry Moore who drives all the guys wild as the put-upon waitress who seems to only have eyes for Frank Lovejoy, "the professor" (of what we're not exactly sure) and Whit Bissell as the annoyingly chatty salesman who wanders in and out of the picture whenever a couple of uninterrupted minutes of bizarre banter is required.
This is not a normal film in any true sense of the word. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and, apart from aligning itself with the then current trend of pseudo patriotic, anti- communist espionage films, it isn't easy to guess what was really on the minds of those who produced this delirious little oddity. At times hilarious (possibly intentional, possibly not) and grimly somber, SHACK OUT ON 101 defies rational description and should most definitely be experienced at least once, or in the case with some of us, as often as humanly possible.
