Just perfect...

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Brilliant allegorical film about wealth, power, and commitment in America. Judging from other reviews, the film does not appeal to everyone. That's understandable. The characters are almost uniformly dislikable, from the abusive Rich (John Heard), to the egotistical Alex (Jeff Bridges), to the self-pitying Mo (Lisa Eichorn), to the slimy George (Arthur Rosenburg)-- there is no one left to root for. At least not until later when the two crippled halves of Bridges and Heard finally unite, figuratively and literally, into one potent whole. Then we realize that it's toward this completion that the twists and turns of the movie have been moving all along. (I think this also explains why the Ann Dusenberry character drops out at a critical stage. She is no longer needed to get the two together.)Rarely has any film dared to create such an unsympathetic cast of personalities, especially Heard's Richard Cutter. If he has a single redeeming quality, I can't find it. His loud, grating voice annoys, piling on one sarcasm after another, oblivious to the hurt he causes. Like Mo he wallows in self-pity, and even shamelessly exploits his disability. Then too, his pursuit of the god-like J. J. Cord should appear noble, yet seems more the result of paranoid rage than a desire for justice. In fact, Heard's explosion of anger on the Santa Monica pier is among the scariest, most convincing expressions of pent-up emotion that I've seen in many years of movie watching. Perhaps he can be charitably viewed as an avenging angel, in the manner of Lee Marvin in Point Blank. But that's a a stretch, since the Vietnam War has left him literally half-a-man, a berserk little top spinning around on alcohol and apoplexy, which, of course, is why he needs the able-bodied Alex to carry out his obsession.Yet Bridge's Alex Bone is an ultimate floater, getting by on boyish good-looks and charm. He has no concerns beyond himself, even seducing the vulnerable Mo, while husband Cutter is away. Apathy is his natural state. So trying to get him to act on the murder he's witnessed is like trying to push a big rock uphill. In fact, when he finally does blend with Cutter's rage and act, it's only because of Cord's arrogant 'sunglasses' gesture, and not because of a sudden steadfast commitment. In most films, it would be the handsome Bone riding the white charger and storming the heavens, having undergone a last minute conversion, and finally giving the audience someone to root for. Here, however, it's the wild spirit of Cutter who rides to the rescue, having at last gotten his legs back if only for a moment. Thus, contrary to expectations, the only concession to Bone is a compromised last minute one.There is, of course, a political subtext to all of this as one perceptive reviewer points out. Perhaps it's about how criminal wealth and power exist beyond the reach of ordinary folks, and how a commitment for change gets dispersed by escapism and a popular feeling of powerlessness, which can only be corrected by what appears a radical form of madness. But allegories aside, this is a bitter brew that does not go down easily. More than that, however, it remains a superb cult film whose provocative characters and perplexing imagery stay with you long after the screen has gone to black.

"What is exaggeration to one class of minds, is plain truth to another." - Dickens Perhaps the last of its kind, Ivan Passer's "Cutter's Way" is a richly allegorical post-Watergate, post-Vietnam noir. Operating as a kind of sequel to Pakula's "Parallax View", the film stars John Heard as Alex Cutter, an angry Vietnam veteran who's returned from what he now regards as a meaningless war minus an arm, an eye and a leg.The casting of Heard is significant. The actor made a trio of films, now largely forgotten, in which he played disaffected twenty-something American's, all suffering from a 1960's hangover ("Between the Lines", "Head Over Heels" etc). In "Cutter's Way" Heard pushes these characters to their extreme. He paints Cutter as a perpetual drunk, a messy tangle of counter-culture eccentricities, post Vietnam angst, bitterness and barely contained rage. He's emblematic of America's Lost Generation, high on drugs, booze and paranoid blues.The film opens on a L.A. street parade. It's an ominous black-and-white image, into which patriotic reds, whites and blues slowly seep. We then begin to coalesce on a blonde girl dancing in a white dress. She vanishes, foreshadowing a girl's murder later in the film. The figure of a man riding upon a white horse is hidden, almost imperceptibly, in the centre of this introductory image. His significance becomes apparent later on.Passer's introduction conjures up every offbeat noir from "Out of the Past" to "Blow Up" to "Parallax View". But what's intriguing about "Way" is how much it actively tries NOT to be a noir. In this regard much of the film centres on Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges, always cool), a Santa Barbara gigolo, yachtsman, beach-bum and slacker (the genesis of Jeffery Lebowski?) who we first see trimming his whiskers and flexing his brawny body over the bed of a female conquest. Passer paints Bone as Cutter's opposite: self absorbed, non committed, forever without attachments and riding through life on a wave of perpetual youth. Significantly, Bone's nickname is "Rich" and he's periodically tantalised with the prospects of an "esteemed" job; the tanks of Reaganism are on the lawn, and Bone's soul is ripe for picking. "Sooner or later you're going to have to make a decision about something," characters say, but his ears remain deaf. This is the film's underlying preoccupation: making decisions, taking a stand on something.The film's noir plot begins late. Bone witnesses a man discarding a dead girl's body. He tentatively identifies this man as J.J Cord, a powerful oil tycoon, but isn't sure. Indeed, for the purposes of the film, Cord mightn't even exist. He's a spectral figure, part archetypal noir "puppet master", part scapegoat, part State power personified. Bone wants to leave Cord alone, but Cutter latches on to the murder mystery with the ferocious tenacity of a pit-bull. These two opposite motions – yin and yang – influence Passer's aesthetic. On one hand his film's oddly relaxed, non-committed, skirting around its red herring narrative and refusing to engage its own plot, let alone acknowledge the girl's murder. On the other hand, it's at this very apathy, this "narrative slackness", which Cutter chips away (Bone plays with toy guns while the impatient Cutter blasts away with the real thing). In his quixotic quest for justice Cutter's then transformed into a one legged Ahab obsessively in pursuit of his own Moby Dick (the white whale echoing Cord's saintly white horse). But whose side do we take? Cutter shows flashes of genius, mentioning Hamlet, Moby Dick, LA history and Marx, but he's a hothead, embittered and drunk, and his judgement may be clouded. Though it is suggested that Cord murders Cutter's wife, Passer is careful to leave every act of violence ambiguous. Cord's wife, Mo, may have killed herself, their home may have been burnt by a disgruntled neighbour and not Cord, and the film's climax never resolves whether or not Cord is guilty. Are Cutter's actions radically, politically and righteously motivated, or is he deranged? In "Neon Noir" author Woody Haut argued that Vietnam not only damaged the body politic, but blurred the line between the perpetrators of crimes and those who investigated them. In "Cutter's Way", social justice has been left up to rejects, outsiders and the dregs of society. Cutter himself is plainly a visual emblem of cultural trauma (see Ashby's "Coming Home"). Interestingly, while Passer emphasises Bone's masculinity, his chiselled body, his physical perfection, it is the cripple Cutter who emerges as the film's masculine ideal. "It must be tough playing second fiddle to a one eyed cripple," Mo tells Bone. Meanwhile, Cutter attempts to force his friend out of passivity and into emotional and ideological commitment. The film then ends with Cutter and Bone holding the gun that kills (we assume) Cord, at last joined in previously denied phallic power. Hence the film's title: doing things Alex Cutter's way is doing things right, pursing a moral conviction all the way (see Altman's "The Long Goodbye").End result: while the film registers a certain masochistic pleasure in the loss of centrality, of white privilege, its ultimate message is fairly subversive for a Hollywood noir. Wealth/power may exist beyond the reach of the ordinary, Passer says, but more importantly, change is bulldozed by escapism, non-commitment and vacillation. "I don't feel anything," Cutter's wife repeatedly states, as she drowns herself in alcohol. Her husband may have zombie limbs, but she's the zombie. By the film's end you're left with two poles: Richard "walking away is what you do best" Bone, seemingly on the fast track to a white collar wonderland, and Cutter, whose existence suggests that agency now lies only in a radical form of madness. Beyond all this, the films works equally well as a detective movie, romance and a drama about the camaraderie between a gang of castaways and would-be gumshoes.8.9/10 – Worth two viewings.

This movie is beautifully shot with a great score that sounds unlike any other score I've ever heard. Then you have a great performance from John Heard and a great screenplay that obviously had a tremendous novel behind it.If you like those gritty late 70s early 80s California noir movies like Straight Time, Who'll Stop The Rain and Chinatown, this is as good as any of those. I have just watched it and I don't think I will forget it anytime soon. It's packed with memorable moments and fully-developed characters.They don't make movies like this anymore. It makes me wonder what Jeff Bridges thinks about on the set of Iron Man 2 - I've never been a huge fan but the guy did a string of great dramas in the 80s like Fabulous Baker Boys, American Heart and this. He must be thinking "what happened to all those good scripts that used to be knocking around??"

Did the other reviewers see the same movie? We watched this, remembering it's reputation from the 80s as a good movie. Instead, we got bad American fake noir with a meandering script, one-dimensional characters, and poor Jeff Bridges wandering around looking for a decent scene where he can keep his shirt on. We stopped caring about halfway through, but decided to wait for the prescribed "cat and mouse" game of the CD jacket. Sorry, missed the mouse as well as the cat -- just a couple of weasels running around trying to find justice instead of taking whatever evidence they had to the D.A. like big boys. CW has not aged well -- drunken wife-beaters with drunken wives are no longer considered pathos, just pathetic. Hangers-on who can't make a decision and sleep with their best friend's wives: dopes. Rich guys who are "responsible" for the ills of the world? Sorry -- watch "Chinatown."Best part was recognizing Will Roger's Sunset Boulevard ranch and stable in the final scenes and during the polo match. Otherwise, a waste of time.