The Confessional: The Chase {1966}

The Chase is one of those films nearly everyone loves to hate. Ridiculed upon its release in spring 1966, the film has been portrayed as a wild look inside a small Texas town on what seems like a typical Saturday night--a fancy dress-up party for the chief industrialist; the drunken near-orgies of the middle age, middle class crowd; secret and not-so-secret affairs of the body and the heart; beatings, misogyny, and racism. Just an average night. The thing that throws the town even further into chaos is the return of one Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), newly escaped from prison and making his way back to his home town.

On paper the film seemed a sure-fire hit. The story originated as a book and play by Horton Foote. Oscar-winning producer Sam Spiegel (The African Queen; On the Waterfront; Suddenly, Last Summer; Lawrence of Arabia) bought the rights and hired playwright Lillian Hellman to adapt it. Marlon Brando was attached to the project practically from its inception. Brando was in the middle of his generally woeful 1960s period and had signed on for the cut rate of $750,000 (down from the $1 million he received for The Fugitive Kind, Sidney Lumet's 1960 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending). The Chase cast was diverse, filled with a solid line-up of character actors--E.G. Marshall, Robert Duvall, Janice Rule, Henry Hull, Bruce Cabot, Miriam Hopkins--and young up-and-comers, including Jane Fonda, James Fox, and Robert Redford.

To direct, Spiegel considered some of the biggest names in the business: William Wyler; David Lean, an odd choice, given the material; Elia Kazan, likely due to the casting of Brando; and Fred Zinnemann. Joseph L. Mankiewicz was lined up but wanted Bubber and his wife, Anna, to be black, and Spiegel wouldn't comply. Ultimately, Arthur Penn was given the director's chair. Penn was a good choice. He had had tremendous success with actors (Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won Oscars for Penn's The Miracle Worker, released in 1962), yet he was still considered a newcomer to the Hollywood establishment. Penn had just completed a rather avant-garde film, Mickey One, with Warren Beatty which failed miserably at the box office and befuddled much of the critical community. Further, in Hollywood, New Yorker Penn was committing the ultimate betrayal--he wouldn't move to the west coast permanently and didn't play by the town's rules. Nevertheless, he hoped The Chase would cement his position as an A-list director.

Screenwriter Lillian Hellman had worked on Broadway with Penn on the hit Toys in the Attic. "We were pretty good friends," says Penn. At this point, though, according to the director, "Lillian was pretty annoying and not really functioning very well." Fortunately, during pre-production, Penn enjoyed Spiegel's company, finding the producer elegant and cultured, and his suggestions on the screenplay helpful: "Sam was pretty good on construction."

Robert Duvall's Edwin Stewart meekly watches wife Emily (Janice Rule)
enjoy a motorcycle while playing to the camera in The Chase

But the screenplay seemed to be the main source of the production's problems. It's also what most critics pointed to as the most weakest aspect of the film. Ivan Moffat (A Place in the Sun, Giant, Bhowani Junction) and even Horton Foote were brought in to improve the story and dialogue, but the movie seemed to be stuck in Peyton Place mode. According to Penn, once filming began, Spiegel was nowhere to be found, though his minions were delivering scene rewrites to the set on a near-daily basis. "Once the film started shooting, there was no exchange between us," Penn stated. Then things went from bad to worse when Spiegel took control in the editing room. Panned by critics except for some in Europe, The Chase had cost $5.6 million. It did not make its money back in initial release.

Director Arthur Penn points out a thing or two to his star, Marlon Brando

I can't quite recall when I first saw The Chase, but I know I was in high school, that terrifically impressionable time. I was taken with it immediately in spite of its soapy elements. If it wasn't for my interest in Marlon Brando at that time, it probably would have taken longer for The Chase to appear on my radar. But as a teenager, I was determined to see all of Brando's films when they showed on television. The Chase was one of the earlier ones, along with The Men, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Wild One, and Guys and Dolls. In The Chase, his Sheriff Calder is low-key, making the nightly rounds of the small Texas town (actually the Warner's backlot in Burbank, California), trying to keep a lid on its citizens' overheated emotions and find escaped convict Bubber before an angry mob does. As mentioned, Robert Redford is Bubber Reeves, the escapee everyone in town is frightened of, fascinated by, or both. Jane Fonda plays Anna, Bubber's wife, who is having an affair with Bubber's best friend, Jake Rogers (James Fox), son of town tycoon, Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall).

Other folks in town include sexy Janice Rule as Emily Stewart, wife of a schlubby Edwin Stewart, played by Robert Duvall; Richard Bradford as town bully Damon Fuller, who is having one of those affairs of the body with Emily Stewart; Henry Hull as a racist landlord; Miriam Hopkins as Bubber's mother; and so on. From just this bit of character detail, you get a fair sense of the soapy, Peyton Place-style elements. As the critics opined, the plot is the main flaw in the film. It's overheated and overly simplistic. The characters are not well written, though there is some good dialogue, mostly spoken by Brando's Calder. A spot-on Clifton James, marvelously doing his good ol' boy routine says to Calder, "The taxes in this town pay your salary to protect the place," to which Brando shoots back, "Well, if anything happens to you, Lem, we'll give you a refund." Lusty Emily's outlook: "Shoot a man for sleeping with someone's wife? That's silly. Half the town'd be wiped out."  

Jane Fonda, torn between two lovers in The Chase: James Fox on the left
and an impossibly young Robert Redford on the right

The Chase has situations that still resonate, including the blatant racism of the town's whites towards all its people of color; the limitations of small-town life; and the unhappy marriages (only Calder and his wife, played by Angie Dickinson, appear to be happily married). The infidelity, anger, drunkenness, and violence still strike a nerve more than fifty years on. One of the film's most brutal--startlingly brutal even today--scenes is when Sheriff Calder is beaten by some of the townspeople, waiting for Bubber's return. That violence peaks (spoilers ahead) with the murder of Bubber, and it looks deliberately staged to evoke the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. While I don't know what audiences of the day thought, today the exploitative style of the scene leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Yet the film is strangely prescient--Trump's MAGA, fifty years before it happened.

Richard Bradford and Janice Rule continue their acquaintance in The Chase

The Internet Movie Database gives The Chase a middling rating, but that's based on only six critics. If you give into it, though, The Chase provides many pleasures, in spite of its obvious faults. Funny that a movie that was a joke in 1966 feels so relevant today.

Sources

Books-
Sam Spiegel by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni
Films of Marlon Brando  by Tony Thomas
Internet-
IMDB
Rotten Tomatoes
Wikipedia
Disc-
Blu Ray courtesy of Twilight Time