Roadgames (1981, Richard Franklin) (Patreon)

61/100

Settled in for what I assumed would be a tense thriller, was not at all unpleasantly surprised to instead get...I dunno, how would one classify this? It's not a comedy, precisely, but a light goofiness predominates throughout most of the first hour; Quid's ostensibly dingo-addressed monologues paved the way for Big Trouble in Little China's Jack Burton, though Keach creates a fully three-dimensional character rather than a neo-John Wayne caricature. "Rear Window in a truck" was reportedly Franklin's original concept, but the film he made, as scripted by regular collaborator Everett De Roche, seems much less invested in potential danger than it does in the stream-of-consciousness musings of an idiosyncratic autodidact—a man who keeps insisting that driving a truck doesn't make him a truck driver, who constantly quotes obscure poetry (some of which seems to have been invented, or at least Google turned up nothing but this film), who knows off the top of his head that the rabbit is Oryctolagus cuniculus. And then for a chunk in the middle we also get Jamie Lee Curtis in what I believe was then her relatively untapped sardonic mode (though I've seen neither Prom Night nor Terror Train, so might be mistaken about that). Can't say I ever truly gave a damn about Green Van Man—an indifference that Roadgames at one point weirdly seems to encourage, fading to black after Hitch* spots the dude lurking near their campsite at night, then fading back up the next morning, as if being stalked in the outback by a possible killer were something one could just ignore—and of course Rear Window becomes thoroughly generic once you're no longer implicating viewers in your protagonist's unseemly voyeurism. But Franklin still generates some decent tension (mostly later in the going, when the tone shifts a bit; I particularly dug one expertly shot moment in which an almost subliminal drifting pan along and juuuust past Quid's profile in the cab suggests a potential attack—nothing even happens, it's just a matter of calling attention to the space just behind Quid's head as he's at the wheel), and Quid and Hitch make for such fine company that it might have been fine even if he hadn't. 

What hampered my enjoyment, perhaps to an irrational degree, is the hard-to-swallow combination of "road movie spanning multiple days and hundreds if not thousands of miles" with "tiny cast of recurring characters." I get that there's probably only one road and that everyone's likely headed to Perth, but Quid encountering every single vehicle at least twice, separated by long intervals, just starts to seem mechanical after it happens the fourth or fifth time. Doesn't help that the reappearance of Self-Destructively Angry Dweeb Towing A Boat Trailer constitutes the movie's weakest setpiece, seemingly designed to serve up some relatively cheap spectacle. But all of that repetition also undermines the green van's omnipresence, making it seem less as if Quid's being targeted and more as if we're watching one of those cross-country-race pictures that were so inexplicably popular in the '70s. Lots of similar "Hey there's that other car we know at this gas station!" bits in Cannonball Run and Gumball Rally, if I can trust my ancient memories. Other minor irritations include Brian May's incongruously boisterous score, which seems to have been composed for a far more dynamic film than this low-key ambler, and the void that's left by Hitch's essentially permanent disappearance (at a much earlier point in this narrative than Lisa Fremont heading over to Thorwald's apartment in Rear Window's, plus Quid spends much of the time mistakenly believing that Hitch is voluntarily boinking the guy—nice character touch, but damaging to any sustained suspense and also it brings back yet another vehicle, the newlywed car, please stop with that). Still, what I'll remember in years to come are the many wonderfully ridiculous touches, like Quid attempting to steal a motorcycle after Hitch gets abducted, crashing it before he's gone even a dozen yards, and then holding various understandably concerned onlookers at bay by brandishing I forget which tool in one hand while laboriously lowering his truck's cab with the other. As I said at the outset, this movie isn't a comedy, precisely. No. Definitely not precisely. 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Released in the U.S. as Road Games, two words, but the "print" I watched (on the Criterion Channel) said Roadgames, and that seems to have been the original title, so I'm sticking with that. 

* No doubt everyone makes this observation, but adorning your Hitchcock riff with a character who's mostly referred to as Hitch, while providing a perfectly sensible alternate reason for that nickname, is really quite clever.