92 in the Shade

Thomas McGuane had a little Hollywood vogue in the mid-1970s, with this movie and "Rancho Deluxe" the same year, then big-budget "Missouri Breaks" the next. The latter film was famously a victim of Marlon Brando's disinterest in following the script, which of course made the writer unhappy. All of these movies were commercial disappointments, so the vogue came to a fast end.

Today "Breaks" has its defenders (though I think it's still a very mixed bag), "Rancho Deluxe" looks like an underrated minor classic of the period, and "92 in the Shade" (which shares some of the same cast as "Rancho") remains a misfire you keep hoping will be better than it is. The typically blank, low-energy Peter Fonda aside, it's got a theoretically fine cast. But the movie just never quite works in translating McGuane's distinctive literary sensibility to the screen--and that is because McGuane as film director (for the first/last time) has no idea how to stage scenes or pace the whole. There's no variation in tone, no overall suspense or tension, which is unfortunate because the very heart of his writing is its loopy mixture of wacky humor and narrative intrigue. None of that comes across here, despite characters and incidents that ought to work.

The film just pokes along neutrally from one sequence to another, getting no particular flavor from the Florida coastal setting, generating no sense of peril even though it ends in violence (and both Warren Oates and Burgess Meredith in unusually negative, unsympathetic roles). The characters are superficially colorful but fail to come alive; Elizabeth Ashley's wife (to Harry Dean Stanton, much better used in "Rancho," which she was also in) never transcends caricature, and Margot Kidder's girlfriend is just The Girl. These are actors with so much personality, it's amazing that the film manages to make them uninteresting. It's not a terrible film, but McGuane's inexperience means the dominating tone isn't his eccentric authorial one, it's the default competence of his crew, who pretty obviously made most of the technical decisions themselves for lack of much directorial guidance.

Anyway, watching this in close proximity with "Rancho Deluxe" and "The Missouri Breaks" (both of which I'd originally seen in the 70s) underlined that "Rancho" remains the one movie that did Thomas McGuane justice. (Admittedly, I haven't seen "Tom Horn"--but I have seen "The Sporting Club," unfortunately, and that's as much a misfire as "92," although in a much more bombastic, self-important way.)