In our home theatre, we often run a "Complete" festival showcasing all the work of a director or star. When it came around to Greydon Clark, I checked the IMDb listing to make sure I had all of them and found this at the beginning of the directorial list. Comparing to an older list, this was a new addition and with the lack of info provided, I figured finding it was a lost cause and possibly a lost film.
To my surprise, a bit of searching provided it and as the festival began, we played it. I hadn't seen The Bad Bunch in years (IMDb title Tom, aka N Lover), but I was immediately struck by similarities. After a few minutes, I realized that this debut effort was roughly half of The Bad Bunch!
Clark, in the spirit of exploitation master Al Adamson (with whom he'd worked in the years preceding this effort), took this drama about a returning Vietnam veteran's relationships with the titular trio, and used much of the footage for the far more widely known/seen/released later film while creating a whole new plot.
Spurred by the brief Vietnam flashback scene in MF&L, TBB took off in a whole different direction with an increasingly bitter and downbeat look at the effort of the main character, played by Clark, to befriend his fallen comrade's family amid racial tensions. Much has been written about TBB for better or worse but it clearly was geared to tap into the Black cinema market that was drawing crowds regularly. Just as Adamson would retool his projects or simply change the ad campaigns to cater to popular trends, this early Clark effort became something wholly different.
MF&L is more in the spirit and tone of several other low budget counterculture projects of the day. It's rough around the edges and sometimes right through the middle, but it's interesting to compare the two projects and see how the relatively placid earlier film became the later one.
