I Saw A Film!

It’s another of those: Women who have had enough and decide to take on the world through a series of old fashioned bank-robberies and fighting with the law type films. Lucky for them they are up against goony ineffectiveness in a series of slack-jawed men who basically nut themselves on fence posts when they happen to see a boob. Couple this vaudevillian slapstick with a soundtrack built to remind us of the Beverley Hillbillies, and add some ferocious shotgunned violence and you’ve got yourself a dusty 70s exploitation fantasy with a couple of lovely blondes and some unlikely dynamite set-ups.

They pick up a boyfriend sporting a cowboy hat in the form of Chuck Connor’s son from The Rifleman, which allows for some dreamy out-of-focus bareass champagne-in-the-woods indulgence. The ladies start in a Mustang and end up with a Rolls (not exactly incognito), but never seem to go very far away from the banks they have hit. Indeed they’re even recognized in a restaurant by a bank manager they caused to lose his job (though why he was then eating out at an expensive restaurant with his tearful wife was not well explained). I suppose it was true of Bonnie and Clyde that they drove a seldom varying route that allowed the feds to predict their position, but this is decades later and we had an interstate roadway by this time which should have allowed our fearless dynamite-tossing ladies to avoid the “Boss Hogs” hot on their tail.

Is there a renegade, counter-culture aspect to this film? Hardly. There’s little discussion of any social or economic American unfairness. The point of the robberies seems to be for little more reason than the thrill. We’re told that the first of the dynamite robbers was formerly in prison, and the second joins because she’s having a miserable time at her job at the bank! And while I’m not unsympathetic to complaints of American feudalism (I won’t mention a certain President just acquitted of the most obvious and heinous criminality in the history of the office) it was a bit of a relief that we weren’t being lectured to by these bomb-throwing silly ladies (in other words, they didn’t try to turn it into a Boxcar Bertha).

This is running freebies on Prime and you’ll likely find yourself chuckling as they ladies ride off for Mexico on horseback to banjo music! Poor Mexico, the repository of all our anti-social fantasies.