Americana

A personal project for actor-producer-director David Carradine, playing a loner Vietnam vet (is there any other kind?) who drifts into a quiet Kansas town, befriending a pretty flower-child and coming upon a dilapidated carousel in an overgrown field. Carradine's obsession with the merry-go-round is steeped in the hypothetical, but we can appreciate his mysterious drive, as can Barbara Hershey (she was Carradine's real-life girl when much of the film was shot in 1973). Although screenwriter Richard Carr based his script on Henry Morton Robinson's novel "The Perfect Round", this feels very much like a semi-remake of (or homage to) Akira Kurosawa's "Ikiru" from 1952, and the troubled final result went through a number of title changes (at one time it was announced as "Butterfly"). Michael Stringer's cinematography is quite good, with sunset reds and dusty browns, and Carradine's anti-hero of very few words--while familiar--is still quite interesting. **1/2 from ****