Apparently, I Watched This, #2: "Vigilante Force" (1976)

The 1970s, a time when the Western was officially declared dead and absolute distrust of official representatives of the law was fashionable, either because they were seen as fascistic bullies or quivering wimps hamstrung by rules safeguarding the rights of criminals, marked the emergence of the vigilante as the most ubiquitous kind of action hero in movies. The first sign that this unsung little exploitation item from our bicentennial year might be a bit different comes with its use of the "v" word in its very title, a touch that would have struck the makers of Dirty Harry or Death Wish as being just a tad on the nose. The second sign comes in the opening scenes, set in a sleepy little California town that is experiencing the sleepy little town's equivalent of the night sweats. In the first few minutes, the local bar, which, at midday, is packed to the rafters with rowdy drunks, is the scene of a murder; some guy pulls a gun and blows a hole in some other guy's midsection, and instead of this having the effect you might expect--i.e., of emptying the place out pronto, the shooting seems to excite all the bystanders so much that they all start brawling.

It turns out that Squaresville, or Snoozeburg, or whatever the place is supposed to be called, has become the home away from home for a small army of white trash outsiders who have converged there to work on some offscreen oil drilling project. The local burghers talk about these honest American laboring men the way Daniel Day-Lewis talked about the Irish in Gangs of New York, and express contempt for their local chief of police, a pudgy, watery old dude whose preferred method of dealing with the rising crime rate is standing outside some establishment where the oil workers are staging a reenactment of the sack of Rome, wringing his hands and whining about how having actual lawbreakers around makes his job too hard. (The character is called "Harry Lee", a small detail that, for viewers of the movie who once lived in Louisiana, will constitute a major bonus.) A recall election would seem to be in order, but Jan-Michael Vincent, the wiry, snub-nosed star of White Line Fever and the "Danger Island" segments of The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, has another idea. Vincent's ne'er-do-well brother, Kris Kristofferson, is back from Vietnam, and at Vincent's urging, the town fathers agree to hire him and a bunch of his ne'er-do-well buddies to serve as a head-cracking auxiliary force to the regular police. At first, it seems as if Kris and his boys will supply just what's needed to restore order to the town, but Kris, who was made to feel most unwelcome back in the town's quieter days, has a chip on his shoulder and a sneaky gleam in his eye. Once he gets his hands on some official requisition forms, it isn't long before the hapless police chief is answering his office phone and telling someone, "No, I'm not doing anything with an M-16 anti-tank weapon. Why?"





Is Vigilante Force a good movie? Well, Brad Dexter turns up in it as the town mayor, and Ethan Mordden once wrote that any movie in which Brad Dexter has more than three lines is immediately disqualified from consideration as a good movie, so I guess that settles that. It's too bad that Kristofferson turns out to be plotting a heist; the movie would have more kick if he and his band intended to take the town over and stick around, especially if they got it in their heads that they were doing everyone a favor by taking the place over and ruling it as less-than-benign dictators, the only way to keep the peace in a world gone nuts. It's diverting and weird, though, and the dialogue is frequently choice. Bernadette Peters shows up, singing, off-key, in the local gin joint, with a black feather boa draped listlessly around her shoulders and the lyric sheet in her hand. (Accompanying her at the piano is Dick Miller, who, when she asks him, "What the hell key are you playin' in?", snaps back, "All the keys you were singin' in.") When Peters meets Kristofferson, she smiles at him dreamily and says, "I remember you. Texaco station, ladies' room, Texarcana, 1969." Kristofferson smiles back and drawls, "All of '69, I was in the Orry-ent." Circumstances eventually force Kristofferson to lean on his brother, burning down his business--as they gaze at the flaming wreck together, Kristofferson mutters, "Ya shoulda hired some vigilante firemen"--and wasting Vincent's girlfriend, Victoria Principal. "I'm gonna kill you," he advises her as he takes out his gun. She asks him why. "I don't wanna talk about it," he grunts. "I don't wanna hear about it. I have seen and heard it all." At moments like that, you have to wonder if you're watching a movie made by an unusually blunt hack or a parodist on the make. It could be the work of an unusually blunt parodist.

Vigilante Force was written and directed by George Armitage, whose early credits, all products off the Roger Corman assembly line, included writing the script for Gas! (1970), which Corman directed, and Night Call Nurses (1972), for director Jonthan Kaplan; writing and directing Private Duty Nurses (1971); and a small acting role in Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat. He also wrote the deranged blacksploitation movie Darktown Strutters (1975) and the Leno-vs.-Letterman HBO film The Late Shift (1996) and directed the superior network TV movie Hot Rod (1979), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), and the dud Elmore Leonard adaptation The Big Bounce (2004). Demme stepped in to help produce his best movie, Miami Blues (1990), starring Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Fred Ward as Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley. That was a modern underground classic, but for the most part, Armitage has spent the bulk of his career seeming less like a director than a professional smart ass--or, to put it more prissily, a "gadfly"--who likes to mess around with the ingredients and conventions of genre movies.

Except when Jonathan Demme is looking over his shoulder, he's not especially good at building the kind of motor that a good genre movie needs, and he usually fails to push his offbeat ideas far enough to turn the conventions fully inside out and create a new kind of movie, or one that transcends genre. When he's cooking, though, he can be counted on to at least give you something to hoot at. In the big climax, Vincent goes head to head with Kristofferson and his crew, who are garishly costumed in what look like red lion tamers' outfits so as to blend in on the day of the town's big patriotic parade and celebration. They run around shooting at each other in tall grass and while sloshing through the water, and it's obvious that it's meant to look as if they're refighting the Vietnam War on native ground. The political metaphor doesn't really take, because Armitage hasn't done enough to clarify what Vietnam means to the characters (and what it did to them) to make it organic. But you do get to see Kristofferson firing off rounds and lobbing grenades, and ultimately doing a reprise variation on James Cagney's explosive death scene in White Heat, while dressed as if he were playing Professor Henry Hill leading the marching band in The Music Man.