John Corda I think that "The Chase" has been sort of loss in the shuffle of time. To see it now it's not only chilling but profound. I don't think it should be much of a surprise considering the people involved. Horton Foote (Trip To Bountiful) wrote the play, Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes) wrote the screenplay and Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) directed and I haven't even started with the cast yet. Marlon Brando giving one of his best, adult, performances. His walking the thin line between duty and loyalty is powerful and profoundly moving. Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall, James Fox, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, E G Marshall even Miriam Hopkins. Gene Milford's editing, and Joseph LaShelle's spectacular cinematography all wrapped up in a phenomenal score by John Barry. A must.

Smerdyakoff This movie was a product of the times like "All in the Family". Yeah, it was a Texas small town full of greedy heartless racist amoral lustful horrible white people. Maybe the writer was projecting her Hollywood social milieu? But nothing about it was believable starting with the beautiful sweet escaped con Bubber (what a stupid name) played by Robert Redford. He only had a couple months to go on his sentence, for a crime that was never mentioned but he had to be a free man like Cool Hand Luke, a classic 60s rebel stereotype mode. But he had to get free. The first big drama was that the hardened con he broke prison with killed a man for his car and money, which of course implicated Blubber. Even though most people in Tarl, the town in question, who knew Bubber knew he was basically a nice guy, lots of people all got it into their heads Bubber was coming back to get them personally. The spiteful weak bank VP Edwin Stewart, played by Robert Duvall, was certain Bubber was going to get him because of what he did to him 20 years ago as teenagers. Meanwhile his cheating lustful wife Emily is flirting with other men at his work place. This is just one example of the cartoonish Peyton Place vibe of the film. The film is partially carried by Marlon Brando as the town sheriff, Calder. He is a good man along with his stolid wife Ruby, played by Angie Dickinson. They managed to work some small Southern town racism on the side to gin up our contempt for these "evil" Southern white people. This is what made the movie so appealing to leftist urbanites and foreigners whose inclination was to regard the whole South as evil racist troglodytes,The script had some intelligence in it, but that was subsumed by its cynical cleverness. But it all failed at the end with a ridiculous and fatal scene in a burning junkyard. Here the locals all gathered to get Bubber, torch the place and party at the same time. The final climactic scene made no sense with one of the locals imitating Jack Ruby and gunning down the hapless Bubber, as our noble sheriff brought him to jail. This of course made no sense since Bubber did not murder a president. At worst he was suspected of murdering a strange man from another part of Texas so the movie's "Jack Ruby" connection is tenuous at best.

classicsoncall A frustrating element bookends this picture with the character of Mrs. Reeves (Miriam Hopkins), mother of Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), escaped from prison and on the run from a murder he's sure to be blamed for but didn't commit following the breakout. Each time we see her she's blaming herself for the way her son turned out, and quite literally has a nervous breakdown trying to convince Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando) to give her son a pass. Bubber himself looks at his mother with disdain when she appeals to him by insisting that he take the money from the sale of the Reeves home to pay for a good defense lawyer. I would have welcomed a fuller exposition of what was going on there with Bubber and his Mom.It always fascinates me how certain actors establish a certain mannerism and use it from picture to picture. I've never read anyone else comment on it. In this one, I'm thinking of the way Redford uses that eye squint thing of his, usually just one eye, a trait he also exhibited as the Sundance Kid and as Sonny Steele in "The Electric Horseman". Brando's got his own thing too, but I didn't see it here, that slight brush to the jaw from "The Godfather" and "The Freshman". Other actors that have repeated a technique in a similar manner include Bogart with the facial grimace and Cagney with the shoulder shrug. For me, those little nuances heighten my viewing pleasure when I'm out there trying to catch them.As far as the story goes, I'd be hard pressed to come up with another picture with so many dysfunctional characters, where husbands and wives cheat on each other right out in the open, and carouse their lives away in alcohol and debauchery. It's what gave rise to Sheriff Calder's comment about the citizens of Terrell to wife Ruby (Angie Dickinson), noted in my summary line above. I also thought it kind of odd that Calder and his wife lived in an apartment stepping through a door directly from the sheriff's office. Gee, how weird is that? But you know what, the movie has a way of grabbing the viewer with it's disparate characters leading their train wreck lives, and it makes you want to stick around to see how it all plays out. As a couple of other reviewers on this board have noted, I also made a mental comparison of Bubber's shooting at the end of the story with that of Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. It was almost too blatant, and I'd like to know what went into the decision to film the scene that way.As for Brando, I think he earned his pay here. Not only was his role performed superbly, but he also managed to take some WWE style bumps without benefit of a stand-in. Back in the Sixties that would have been the WWWF, but you know what I mean. He particularly impressed me by falling off the desk in his office after getting trashed by Lem, Damon and Archie. But even at that, and for the life of me, I can't figure out where all that blood came from.

disinterested_spectator Bubber Reeves is a born loser. Actually, there are two types of born losers, so a distinction is in order: first, there are those who fate has decreed shall always lose out no matter what they do; and then there are those who are losers of their own free will. Bubber Reeves is a little of both.It does seem that fate has dealt him a few bad hands. When he was young, he was sent to reform school for something he did not do (stealing some money). And when he escapes from prison, his fellow escapee murders a man and takes off with the man's car, leaving Bubber behind. And when he hops on board a freight train he thinks is headed for Mexico, it turns out that the train is headed north, in the direction of his home town. Of course, fate also made Bubber the best looking guy in the county, which he should have been able to work to his advantage.That he does not turn his good looks to his advantage leads us to the fact that Bubber is also the second kind of born loser. He keeps making bad choices. At one point in the movie, he says to Lester that Lester owes Bubber, because Bubber took a rap for him once. Gee, that was a nice thing to do. But I wouldn't take a rap for anybody, especially if I already had a criminal record. Second, with only a year and three days left in his prison sentence, he makes a break for it because he was served a bad pork chop. Third, even if he did hop the wrong freight, he did not have to go to the one town in North America where everyone would know him, the town where he grew up, and where law enforcement would be most likely to be looking for him. Sheriff Calder says, "Bubber knows better than to come back here." No, apparently he doesn't.Then there is Edwin Stewart, ultimate lickspittle and cuckold. He was the one who stole the money for which Bubber was blamed. He seems to be sorry for what he did, but then he rats out Bubber to gain favor with his boss, Val Rogers, so he is just as despicable as a mature adult as he was as an immature adolescent.Edwin is married to Emily, a sexy, sultry adulteress. Theirs is the most ludicrous marriage since that of George and Sherry Peatty (Elisha Cooke, Jr. and Marie Windsor) in "The Killing" (1956). She not only is obvious in the affair she is having with Damon, which Edwin pretends not to notice, but she also embarrasses Edwin in front of his boss, and belittles him openly because he is such a wimp that he does not carry a gun, unlike most of the men in that town. Yes, to be a real man in this small Texas town, you have to carry a gun. And it must be a revolver. Semi-automatics are for Yankee city slickers.And these are just some of the caricatures in this movie. We never feel that we are watching real people in a real town, but caricatures in a town that itself is a caricature. Sheriff Calder and his wife Ruby seem to be genuine people, so it is no surprise that at the end of the movie, they leave town. Not being caricatures, they just do not belong there.As for Bubber, being the loser that he is, what would normally be an unhappy ending is actually a happy one. That is, when one of the pistol-packing citizens shoots Bubber to death on the steps of the sheriff's office, that would appear to be a bad thing, but we in the audience are relieved. Otherwise, we would have to imagine Bubber going back to prison and having to eat that pork chop.