Tracks (1977)

          Iconoclastic filmmaker Henry Jaglom’s second feature, the Vietnam-vet drama Tracks, is infinitely more coherent than his previous film, the interminable A Safe Place (1971) but it suffers the same pretentious excesses as all of his films. To Jaglom’s credit, his interest in human behavior is broad and genuine, and he gives actors room to run wild with Method-style flourishes. But unfortunately for viewers, Jaglom’s stories amble from one angst-ridden episode to another while unpleasantly self-involved characters mope, scream, and whine about feelings that somehow remain mysterious even after being explained to death.

          Tracks stars Dennis Hopper, at his most gratingly unhinged, as Sgt. Jack Falen, a traumatized soldier escorting a friend’s corpse home for burial. Most of the picture takes place on a train as Falen heads toward his destination and kills time with a swinger (Dean Stockwell) who wants Falen to play wingman while he woos eligible ladies. Despite being inexpressive and moody, Falen somehow hooks up with an innocent hippie chick (Taryn Power) and a randy liberated woman (Topo Swope), which means that viewers get not one but two scenes of Hopper extending his tongue and flailing it at women’s faces in a soggy simulation of kissing.

          Between sexcapades, Falen engages in psychobabble-filled chats with assorted passengers, and he periodically succumbs to psychotic episodes in which he imagines seeing things like gang rape, which prompts him to whip out his sidearm and threaten people. When this pedestrian PTSD shtick reaches a climax, Hopper strips naked and runs through the train; a bit later, he gets off the train and climbs into a grave that he mistakes for a foxhole, at which point another freakout ensues. None of this has much impact, however, since Hopper is so creepy that it’s impossible to care what becomes of his character. Watching Tracks will make most viewers want to make tracks—away from the movie.

Tracks: LAME

A Safe Place (1971)

          The counterculture-savvy production company BBS made several great films in its short lifespan, including Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The Last Picture Show (1971). However the company also made A Safe Place, the debut feature of iconoclastic writer-director Henry Jaglom. Simultaneously impenetrable and interminable, A Safe Place feels like a bad film-school experiment expanded to feature length, because it seems as if Jaglom shot a handful of heavily improvised (but altogether uninteresting) scenes, then tried to cut them together in a manner that imposed a pseudo-structure without draining the individual pieces of their spontaneous “life.” In other words, the picture is 90 excruciating minutes of actors spewing whatever inconsequential nonsense comes to mind while Jaglom photographs them from pretentious angles, often with weird objects placed in the foreground to provide out-of-focus texture.

          The leading player in the picture is the potent Tuesday Weld, who tended to flower in well-scripted material but flounder when cast adrift; she’s so “real,” in the self-important Method sense of the word, that we end up watching her wander through her conception of an ordinary day in the life of her vaguely conceived character, which is as tiring to watch as it is to describe. Weld spews hippy-dippy nonsense, drifts in and out of pointless dialects, and, of course, goes on unmotivated crying gags.

          Jack Nicholson and Orson Welles, apparently friends of Jaglom’s, appear in stupid running cameos. Nicholson mostly makes out with Weld in a series of quick vignettes, and considering the fact that he probably worked on the picture for all of an afternoon, rolling around with his beautiful costar must have been a pleasant way to kill time. Welles appears in silly bits as a magician performing simplistic tricks in Central Park, and it’s sad to see him looking so bloated and bored. As for this snoozefest’s helmer, Jaglom returned to filmmaking a few years later with 1977’s Tracks, and he’s been quite prolific ever since, making scads of pictures in the same loose, improvisational vein.

A Safe Place: SQUARE