How The Chase set the topical, visceral tone for… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

How The Chase set the top­i­cal, vis­cer­al tone for New Hollywood

30 Sep 2022

Words by Chloe Walker

A man wearing a cowboy hat and smoking a cigarette, with a serious expression on his face.
A man wearing a cowboy hat and smoking a cigarette, with a serious expression on his face.
Though large­ly for­got­ten today, Arthur Penn’s 1966 crime thriller remains a fas­ci­nat­ing pre­cur­sor to a film­mak­ing revolution.

In 1967, Bon­nie and Clyde lit the fuse for a Hol­ly­wood rev­o­lu­tion, con­found­ing the crit­i­cal estab­lish­ment, attract­ing droves of wide-eyed audi­ences who’d nev­er seen any­thing like it, and alter­ing the course of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma for­ev­er. The furore around the film was so intense, it more or less wiped direc­tor Arthur Penn’s pre­vi­ous film from the pub­lic con­scious­ness. But for all the adjec­tives that could be used to describe 1966’s The Chase, for­get­table’ is not one of them.

Bub­ber Reeves (Robert Red­ford), a wrong­ful­ly impris­oned con­vict, is tempt­ed into a jail break by a fel­low pris­on­er. After their escape, that pris­on­er kills a per­son and dri­ves away in their car, leav­ing Bub­ber to take the fall and mak­ing him a fugi­tive twice over. The cit­i­zens of his unnamed Texas home­town, with only a few excep­tions, are a row­dy, drunk­en mob who bay for his blood; after hop­ping the wrong train, Bub­ber finds him­self head­ing straight for them. His only hope for pro­tec­tion is the long-suf­fer­ing Sher­iff Calder (Mar­lon Bran­do), who nev­er believed he was guilty in the first place.

The Chase is a big film, run­ning at more than two hours and boast­ing a big-hit­ting cast. Beyond Bran­do and Red­ford, it stars Miri­am Hop­kins as Bubber’s despair­ing moth­er, Jane Fon­da as his anx­ious wife (the first of four fea­tures Fon­da and Red­ford would star in togeth­er over the next 40 years), EG Mar­shall as the town’s obscene­ly wealthy over­lord, and Robert Duvall as his most obse­quious employee.

It was released in the mid­dle of a tumul­tuous decade, and Lil­lian Hellman’s screen­play (adapt­ed from Hor­ton Foote’s nov­el and play of the same name) dives head­first into a pha­lanx of hot-but­ton social issues – racism, wealth dis­par­i­ty, the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, guns – often using the sup­port­ing cast as a kind of Greek chorus.

It’s melo­dra­mat­ic, overblown, some­times down­right hys­ter­i­cal. And yet that hys­te­ria, though mocked in many con­tem­po­rary reviews, which gives The Chase its queasy pow­er. The towns­folk are por­trayed rather like a car­i­ca­ture. Fiendish, almost zom­bie-like; you can’t rea­son with them, and they move in a big, homoge­nous pack. As the film pro­gress­es, their soul­less­ness starts to feel nightmarish.

Trapped in this night­mare is Sher­iff Calder, who in anoth­er actor’s hands could have been a tedious arche­type, a grey wall of good­ness fac­ing off against a town of hedo­nis­tic vil­lains. Bran­do, how­ev­er, makes him a cap­ti­vat­ing pres­ence. He’s nev­er self-right­eous. He doesn’t hide his dis­dain at the cit­i­zens under his juris­dic­tion, or try to show them the error of their ways. He knows they are way beyond that. A pal­pa­ble sense of exhaus­tion radi­ates off of Bran­do, just as potent as the character’s fun­da­men­tal decency.

The passage of time hasnt dimmed the brilliant power of Brandos performance, or the films seething atmosphere.

It was Bran­do who sug­gest­ed to Penn how to shoot the beat­ing Calder endures at the hands of the towns­folk. The actors’ punch­es would make con­tact but be exe­cut­ed slow­ly, and the film would then be sped up. It’s a decep­tive­ly sim­ple idea, but the scene – which unfolds over three ago­nis­ing min­utes – remains fright­en­ing­ly effec­tive. Indeed, the vis­cer­al­i­ty of the attack con­trasts the car­toon­ish vil­lainy dis­played by the towns­folk ear­li­er in the film. Sud­den­ly, the night­mare feels very real.

It’s this con­stant tus­sle between the abstract and the real, between Old and New Hol­ly­wood, that makes The Chase note­wor­thy. The film was shot large­ly on stu­dio sets, and there’s an arti­fi­cial­i­ty to some of the sup­port­ing per­for­mances – a man­nered qual­i­ty to the dia­logue – that seems to belong to an ear­li­er era. But the vio­lence, both the sim­mer­ing promise and the bru­tal real­i­sa­tion of it, fore­told where cin­e­ma was heading.

Behind the scenes, The Chase was plagued by pro­duc­tion issues. Things got so heat­ed between Penn and leg­endary pro­duc­er Sam Spiegel that the direc­tor was tricked out of the final edit. When it was even­tu­al­ly released the film per­formed poor­ly both crit­i­cal­ly and com­mer­cial­ly. Then along came Bon­nie and Clyde.

But the pas­sage of time hasn’t dimmed the bril­liant pow­er of Brando’s per­for­mance, or the film’s seething atmos­phere which still man­ages to bur­row under your skin. With the dust from the firestorm start­ed by Bon­nie and Clyde hav­ing long since set­tled, The Chase sur­vives today as a fas­ci­nat­ing throw­back, a time cap­sule of an indus­try tee­ter­ing on the brink of some­thing new.

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