One False Move

 I saw Carl Franklin's One False Move around 1992.  The film was originally planned as a "straight-to-video" picture and cost less than 2 million dollars.  Although the movie had a brief theatrical release, I saw the picture on video,  The movie had distinctive qualities and I recall several scenes, particularly the blood bath in the beginning and the wounded policeman's conversation with a little boy, impressed me to the extent that vivid memories of these sequences have remained with me for more than thirty years.  But the film soon became hard to access, wasn't shown on cable as far as I know, and I began to wonder if the picture had the merit that I had accorded to it when I saw the movie for the first and only time many years ago.  Criterion agrees with me that One False Move is a remarkable and unique film and has re-released the picture in a deluxe remastered form with, of course, various extras including a commentary by the director and the one of the screenwriters Billy Bob Thornton.  The film is not exactly as good as I remembered it, but very entertaining and, also, well, if unobtrusively, crafted.  The picture remains impressive, although some of the racial issues that it explores, have now been addressed so extensively a bit of the film's novelty has worn off.  The acting is superb and the picture, a neo-noir that morphs into a kind of Western, is very suspenseful and gripping.

The film's narrative invokes various genre conventions.  Two criminals brutally murder a rival gang of drug dealers in LA and go on the lam.  One of the crooks is a repressed, hyper-disciplined criminal mastermind, although with a propensity for sadistically murdering folks with a knife -- this is Pluto played impassively by Michael Beach.  The other criminal Ray (acted by Billie Bob Thornton) is an impulsive psychopath, not too smart, who is controlled by his moll, a call-girl and junkie named Fantasia (Cynda Williams).  In Mayberry RFD, here a place called Star City, Arkansas, the police chief named Dale "Hurricane" Dixon holds sway -- this role is played by Bill Paxton in a remarkable performance that channels Andy Griffith, Barney Fife, but, also, the tough cowboy lawmen played by actors like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart.  The bad guys, fleeing cross-country, are on a course for Star City -- Fantasia has family there (at home she's called Lila) and she wants to see her five-year old son.  Two cynical LA detectives, a white dude and a saturnine black cop, are dispatched to Star City to intercept the villains.  As the reader will observe, every character in this picture is a variant on a stereotype of one sort or another -- the earnest, well-meaning, and naive rural cop, the African-American and White city boy cops, the misguided and beautiful young girl entrapped by her relationship to the psychotically violent Ray, and the imperturbable but vicious criminal mastermind.  The audience is lulled into a sense that this is familiar territory with a final showdown inevitable.  And, in fact, the picture delivers on its genre premises -- the bad guys kill various hapless interlopers during their flight cross-country; the rural cop is outmatched by the savage criminals but has to duel them in the end; and the crook's moll is conflicted, sometimes sympathetic, and, sometimes, callously violent as well.  The film's surprising turn is that the Hurricane Dixon apparently had some kind of sexual affair with Fantasia when she was a 17-year old virgin back in Star City and a little mixed race boy that we see in the company of her brother and mother in Arkansas is, in fact, his child.  Dixon was married when he dallied with Lila (Fantasia) but he and his wife seem to have resolved to put that unpleasant interlude behind them.  Dixon doesn't acknowledge the child, although the little boy lives in his tiny town; in fact, he has a little girl of his own with his somewhat staid and religious White wife. 

The film crosscuts effectively between the depredations committed by the fleeing criminals and Star City where the LA cops work with Dixon to investigate Lila's connections with her kin in town.  Dixon is a well-meaning guy, very gung ho, and casually racist, something that doesn't seem to offend the Black detective from LA too much.  Dixon admires the LA detectives and, even, proposes that after the bust is made in this case, that he go to LA and work with them as a "team" -- as his wife sardonically notes, Dixon "watches too many cop-shows on TV."  The LA police patronize Dixon and, generally, regard him as a clown, although they begrudgingly acknowledge his rapport with the people in town and his ability to de-escalate violent encounters with local shit-heads (to use police diction).  (In one scene, Dixon wrestles a local wife-beater to the ground and, then, talks the man into sleeping it off; the wife or girlfriend demands that the drunk pay for her window which has been broken in the wrestling match with Dixon.  The LA cops watch this confrontation with guns drawn and one expects that if they were managing the encounter the drunk would have ended up dead -- as far as Dixon is concerned, the guy is just a nuisance with a bad temper when he's drinking.  As the film progresses, the villains leave a trail of corpses behind them and, ultimately, have to separate after another massacre in Houston.  Lila takes a Greyhound to Star City, disembarking from the bus at a crossroads in a cornfield where a crop duster is zooming back and forth, an obvious reference to North by Northwest.  In a house on the outskirts of town, Lila confronts Dixon who has come to ambush the bad guys whom he knows are on their way to meet her in Star City.  We learn that Lila had a White father and that she feels that Dixon sexually exploited her when he busted her for shoplifting -- he seems to have released her on the basis of their sexual encounter.  "Why did you have to fuck with me?" Lila says and there's the sense that this episode forced her out of town to LA where things haven't gone too well for her.  Lila has seen her five-year old son at the house on the edge of town and the LA cops roust her brother who denies that he took the little boy out to the hide-out.  (A couple of men hunting bullfrogs to fry up their legs, however, have seen the man with the little boy driving out to the hide-out early in the morning).  As the LA cops with the little boy desperately hunt for the hide-out, the bad guys arrive at the house and shoot it out with Dixon.  Badly wounded, Dixon lies on the driveway in front of the house.  His son by Lila gets out of the squad car in the confusion and asks him why he's bleeding.  "I got in fight," the injured police chief says.  He's talking to the child to distract him from the carnage a few feet away.  The little boy notices his key chain.  "Why do you have so many keys?" he asks.  "I lock things up," Dixon replies.  

The movie was Franklin's first picture and there are some missteps:  the final showdown is signaled by portentous imagery: characters are dynamically framed using tilted (canted) shots; an old man plays a mournful lick on his harmonica, filmed from below so that his form is aggressively foreshortened, like something you might see on baroque trompe l'oeil ceiling; Franklin cuts back and forth between the combatants rushing into battle and non-combatants at home, a kind of editing that D. W. Griffith invented as early as 1909 in A Corner in Wheat and the labor riot scenes in Intolerance (1916).  The effect here is incongruent with the film's otherwise sober mise-en-scene and seems excessively melodramatic -- it's like an eruption of the more extreme choreography in a spaghetti Western, for instance, something by Sergio Leone, in the midst of a film notable for its realism.  But the final gun battle is nicely staged, both brutal and thematically driven.  The rural landscapes with dirt roads ending in refuse dumps and rickety bridges over turgid ponds and streams are intensely imagined and Star City exists in a coherent space that is effectively represented.  The characters are all deeply flawed and this contributes to the film's appeal -- although the plot is generic and builds steadily to the final shoot-out, the protagonists seem like real people:  Lila has been badly damaged by Dixon's intervention in her life and, although she struggles to be decent, she seems to be a cocaine-addicted whore with an impulsive violent streak.  Dixon is a big fish in a small pond, the kind of small-town hero who afflicts places like Star City -- we get a glimpse into his casual corruption when he is showing off for the LA cops; after breakfast, he leaves a ten dollar bill telling the waitress to keep the change -- but, as she points out, the charges are 12 dollars and he's just using his influence to beat the cafe out of some money.  Nonetheless, we feel sorry for him when he comes into the cafe later and hears the two LA detectives, whom he idolizes, mocking him -- this scene of a pretentious character getting his comeuppance when hears accidentally what people really feel about him is also a genre convention; this sort of thing occurs in about half of the old Andy Griffith series shows.  John Carpenter said that he wanted to establish that the bad guys in his first film Assault on Precinct 13 were, in fact, really bad and so he had the villain shoot a little girl in the face through her ice-cream cone.  Franklin is slightly more subtle, but not much -- he has the bad guys butcher six people in the opening scene, cutting them up with knives or suffocating them under plastic sacks tied over their faces; the ultra-violence in the first ten minutes, caused by Fantasia's treachery, is so severe that a lot of people walked out of the first screening of this movie -- but it's arguably necessary to establish the sense of brooding menace that underlies most of the film. Of course, the contrast between city and country is central to the movie -- the White detective from LA says that he's "just a country boy"; when the Black cop questions him about this, the cop says that he was raised in Malibu.