Country Blue

Original movie poster.

The other film I wanted to review a days back was the 1973 flick "Country Blue" which I found on the 50 Drive-In Movie pack released on 2009 by Millcreek Entertainment on 2009. Along with Going Steady these are the latest films I watched last week, and since I'm back in business my movie reviews will be conditioned to diminish from time to time.

Taste that beats the others cold!

The story is set on the life of Bobby Lee Dixon, a drifter on parole who comes back to his old little town in Georgia near the Florida border to among several things, recover his long lost romance with Ruthie who despite everything that went through within the romance, is still faithful to Bobby in her heart, since Bobby finds her married to an unknown man which she's devorcing from.

So Bobby expresses his discontent with the crappy small-town no future he's going to get by being a mere second class car mechanic. So he offers Ruthie to make a commitment to breaking out of their miserable destiny by joining him in robbing a bank in the nearest town...

Bad boys, bad boys watcha gonna do...

Country Blue is a movie with a split personality. For two-thirds of its present length it presents a small southern town with the poverty and no future of every inhabitant stood for the two main characters. It also delivers us two young people playing bandits. Their initial bank robbery is kind of the unexperienced first timers lame number where Ruthie removes her mask almost immediately!, Bobby constantly calls her by name! and she finally does the same for him! 

All the while a fast-talking bank president  poor-mouths his own establishment to convince them that their haul from the tellers' cash drawers is all they're going to get.

This is a robbery!

They leave with less than $2,000 when $40,000, they later learn, was within easy reach. When Bobby reads about it, he can't stand the humiliation, so he robs the bank again and gets the rest of the money. We can give him credit for perseverance, but little else apart from that Southern knack for driving fast and avoiding the police -- and even that fails our pair when they're stopped by a roadblock, chased down on foot and arrested. Up to this point I was thinkin whether the movie writer-director meant us to see Bobby and Ruthie as very lame small-timers or whether their ineptitude was really his as a writer-director. I decided number one to give the director a chance, until the last 30 minutes of the film, when it suddenly became an action packed flick  a la exploitation style that  hadn't really been doing much in that line yet besides from having Ruthie take her top off once to see her tiny boobs for a little while.

You had it coming punk!

So once we get our small timers in prison the jailers set about beating the piss out of Bobby while Ruthie must deal with the attentions of one or two lesbians in  interested in the new fresh arrival when Ruthie is locked in the cell where these dykes are wasting their time. There's nothing explicit about that part and the lesbianism is all talk, and given the way the women look that's probably for the best. It's the thought that counts. Meanwhile, word of their imprisonment reaches Bobby's good friend Arneda Johnson, a local madam and bar owner in the black neighborhood (yeah that means trouble)

Gory action.

Later Arneda comes to the rescue as if she was a low budget blaxpoitation gangster, paying a little visit to the jail with one of her "employees" in order to blackjack a jailer and set Bobby free. Having also freed the less-lesbian of Ruthie's cellmates, the gang finds the head jailer about to rape Ruthie, so Bobby deals with mr. head jailer good. That done, the fugitives pile into a getaway car, only to have the jailers blast a big ol' hole in Ruthie's cellmate. Then Arneda's assistant goes down with a bullet in the head. In a panicky rage, Ruthie grabs a gun and blasts the jailer's head, then finally pushes the two corpses aside so she can close the car door and voilá escape. The escalation of brutality is so sudden that you begin wondering did I fell asleep? is this another movie?

ketchup!

Cool mopar! was it a Plymouth GTX?

Overall, I found Country Blue a decent movie as an example of regional Seventies cinema that tried to say something about the environment it came from. It has a historical value apart from its cinematic qualities, such as they are, that might make it worth a look for all-out Seventies buffs -- and the last half hour may make it worthwhile for fans of action packed exploitation films.

Something I didn't completely understand, or didn't like at all was the way Ruthie's dad behave after Bobby came backe letting him know about the car accident and her death. I was like hey! here Bobby's gonna get it, and nope I was wrong.

Sorry folks, no trailer, no movie excerpt no nothing video related about it.

See you some time soon!