Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (Supercharger Edition) DVD
Amazon Products

 Rating: - A film that aged poorly
I saw this film when it premiered at the Drive-in theaters in the '70s along with my car-crazed pals and we really liked it... but we were really young.

Now, having recently viewed the DVD, I have to say that this is, in truth, an abysmal film. And the hope that young people today would enjoy it will not materialize because movie quality has just evolved way beyond this one and young folks will simply laugh at the bad haircuts and the goofy lines of script.

THE STORY IS A SIMPLE ONE: Two guys (one a racecar driver, played by Peter Fonda, and the other an ace mechanic) pull off a robbery at a large grocery store. The purpose is to get money so that Fonda and his partner can afford to get back into professional racing. Fonda successfully collects the armored car delivery of cash in the store manager's office while the mechanic holds the store manager's wife and daughter hostage at their home.

Unfortunately for Fonda (dubbed "Crazy Larry"), the girl he shacked up with in a motel on the previous evening is a bit of a nut ("Dirty Mary") and she injects herself into Fonda's plans when she follows him to the robbery site and jumps into his getaway car. The robbery comes off okay but the cops are in pursuit more quickly than the two anticipated. It's a key element of the story that this robbery was well-planned including the use of a police radio in the getaway car. The two attempt to dump "Little Mary Coons" (aka "Dirty Mary", aka "Dingleberry," as Fonda calls her) multiple times but she keeps showing up like a bad penny.

Finally, there is a getaway car switch not long into the movie.

Now, here's what's wrong with the film:

1. One thing that boys in the 50s, 60s, and 70s knew ALL about was cars. Here, the initial getaway car is a 1966 Chevy Impala, and the cops keep saying that it's a '68 model -- I remember all of us laughing about that back in the '70s when we FIRST saw this film. That was an egregious error, considering the target audience.

2. Each time one of these three pulls off a one-liner, it's really tragic. And if the jokes aren't bad enough, when the laughing follows, it's so fake and superficial as to be embarrassing. I mean EXCEEDINGLY bad acting!

3. Vic Morrow, otherwise a brilliant actor, really dive-bombs here in his role as Captain of the sheriff's deputies. His script is mindless which doesn't help but he comes off as a crazed D.A. more so than he does a tough guy. He spends most of his time on the two-way radio cussing out his boss, the sheriff, about his departmental policies. It's an egregious performance. Of course, all the deputies who naturally crash their cars attempting to catch Fonda are stereotypically SUPPOSED to come off as D.A.s -- this they do well.

4. The radio thing is bizarre. When it's to Fonda's advantage, none of the other cars or the base can hear him broadcast -- only Morrow can hear, who is the one Fonda's trying to divert. But when anyone else talks on the air, EVERYONE hears the transmission. They just couldn't figure a way to explain this so the director and writers just left it UN-explained.

5. "Dirty Mary" is supposed to be a knockout... and I'll confess that back in the early 70s, we thought that she was. Unfortunately, now she actually looks like Gary Busey's twin sister and exudes the brain-power of a fence lizard. She's supposed to be 22 but she has some really bad neck and face wrinkles (funny we didn't notice that at the Drive-in!) and her make-up is caked on. She intentionally causes Fonda to crash the getaway car in one instance and causes him all manner of grief in other episodes. Any self-respecting robber would have stuck a blade in her gut or shot her in the head after her first infraction.

6. No car would endure the punishment and/or crashes that Fonda's two cars do and continue going. Repairs are made twice along the road and it's ridiculous to believe that they would have had the proper parts to fix the problems. Fonda's second crash would have done a whole lot more than cause a flat tire and mash in the fender. The radiator would clearly have been destroyed but of course this doesn't happen.

There's only one thing good about this movie which is why I gave it TWO stars instead of one: The cars. I liked the blue '66 Chevy, the chartreuse Charger, and the high-performance cop car which the writers/director could have done a LOT more with. This facet clearly showed a lack of imagination in an area where the film could have been vastly improved.

I think a comparable example of a film from the same era and genre, which was EXCELLENT and which incorporated some wild driving was: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Now THAT film even made an old junky-looking car do some really cool stunts and they could have come up with similar ideas for this movie but it simply didn't happen.

So, in summary, if you recalled this film as a great dandy from your youth and you think it will be a repeat performance now, don't disappoint yourself. You've seen too many great movies since then and, even though you didn't detect it as it happened, your standards have probably risen quite a bit over the past 35 years.

Search: