Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry

1974 crime movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A race car driver and his mechanic rob a supermarket and flee in a souped-up Chevy Impala. They also begrudgingly take on a passenger, an obnoxious woman named Mary. Mary's also apparently filthy, but I'm not sure how exactly. A perseverant sheriff tries to catch up with the trio.

Did you really need anything else in the early 70's than Peter Fonda driving around with his Peter Fonda sunglasses--a little like Burt Reynolds sunglasses but much different to any aficionados of either car movies or sunglasses. My favorite Fonda roles are the anti-heroic ones, and this is one of those characters with a tinge of. . .well, craziness. If I was born ten years before I was born, I would have watched this at a drive-in and probably wanted to be Peter Fonda instead of watching The Love Bug (a movie that actually came out six years earlier, but much easier for a kid to see because of the powerful Disney people) and wanting to be Dean Jones. Fonda--who else can say a misogynistic line like "I'm gonna braid your tits" or threaten to break every bone in a woman's crotch and still seem cool? The character in the other half of the title--who is called "Supercrotch" at one point in this movie--is played by cute-as-a-button Susan George, a woman with two eyes. Her performance is in no way good, but there's something naturally likable about her, especially in the way she giggles when she's referenced on the radio. And then there's Deke who should have gotten his name in the title of the movie, too, since he was just as important as the other two. They should have called him Harry and named the movie Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, and Level-Headed Harry. I liked the Hemingwayan grace-under-pressure of that character played by Adam Roarke who was "Clint" in Frogs, a performance that was laughably bad. Then, we have the good (or bad, depending on who you ask) sheriff played by Vic Morrow, an actor who's just perfect for these kinds of roles. He gets a few great lines to chew on--"I could locate 50 blue Chevys in the time it'd take me to pick my nose," "See if you can get the word 'son of a bitch' in print," "What do you think I wanna do? Smell the seats?", "I'm gonna eat your lunch, you long-haired faggot." See, people just knew how to write better in the 1970's. Roddy McDowall gets a small part as the grocery store manager, too. But my favorite acting job is Eugene Daniels as Hank. Daniels was in another John Hough movie--Escape from Witch Mountain. Here, he drives an ultra-fast police cruiser and growls all his lines. "This is where I came fruuuum." It's pretty impressive work, but my favorite thing about it is that the character is completely unnecessary. For the car fetishist, there are plenty of shots of slick cars, and if you like car crashes, there are a few of those, too. And there's a car/helicopter chase that's pretty crazy. It's not, however, as crazy as the ending of this movie. Holy shit! I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't seen this, but it's either the worst ending of all time, like a kid was writing the script and didn't know how to end it, or the greatest ending of all time. I'm leaning toward the latter.

Seriously though. What makes Mary "dirty" in this?