Vincent Canby's review - Cutter's Way (1982) Discussion

[–] EXPLICITSOUL5 17 years ago

Canby's review of this film back in the day is really a pathetic throwaway, completely devoid of thought and merit

Damn straight Troy m'man!
-Ozmodiar

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[–] jt1999 15 years ago

Right. Canby's idiotic review is the main reason the movie was withdrawn from theaters. Death to all critics!

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[–] WarpedRecord 14 years ago

Here is a link to Vincent Canby's review for those who missed it:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9407E0D61138F933A15750C0A96 7948260

I agree that he was way too dismissive of the film, but critics have the right to state their opinions, as long as they can support them – and we have the right to see the evidence for ourself and state our opinions. Mine is that this is an overlooked treasure that was needlessly buried.

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[–] ccr1633 14 years ago

Well, I never said Canby didn't have a right to express his opinion. His dismissive opinion, however, wasn't backed up by any sort of tangible explanation. It amounted to "I didn't like it." He calls the dialog "vivid without being informative or even amusing on any level" and offers this without explanation. I mean, why criticize the dialog for not being amusing? Was it really intended to be? What exactly was so uninformative about it? I found that much of the dialog offered quite a bit of insight into the nature of the principal characters. I could go through the script and back up my point. Canby, on the other hand, gives us nothing specific. What's ironic is that he criticizes the script for being "uninformative" and yet offers a completely uninformative review. It sounds to me like he wrote this while ill, impatient, and under a fast-approaching deadline.

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[–] WarpedRecord 14 years ago

It is a very superficial review and relies on cheap shots and punchlines at the expense of any real insight into what he thought were the film's problems. The cracks about John Heard's eye patch almost obscuring his whole face and Lisa Eichhorn wishing she were in a movie with a better screenplay are standard quips reviewers use when they don't want to go below the surface for a review.

The fast-approaching deadline scenario is very plausible here. I wonder if reviewers regret what they wrote in haste, now that it is dissected in a very different medium more than 30 years later? This excuses nothing, especially for an august publication like the New York Times, but I wonder if this might have been one of the films Canby might have a different assessment about today. He died years ago, so we'll just have to wonder.

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[–] ccr1633 14 years ago

In some sense I'm glad that this is an obscure film, as is Thornburg's book these days. Kind of gives me that old time feeling of having "discovered" a band and caught their great early gigs before they became famous. To this day I turn on new and old friends to the film and the book, which gives me a warm feeling of satisfaction when they tell me "whoa...that was great. Thanks!"

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[–] WarpedRecord 14 years ago

Excellent point. I like the fact that this film has not been co-opted or deconstructed or whatever else the coolios do to their hip films and bands. It's just there for those who choose to seek out quality, overlooked works.

This is a totally random observation, but that word "cutter" seemed to have a brief renaissance in the late '70s and early '80s. It was used in "Breaking Away" to refer to blue-collar stone cutters, sort of a badge of pride for someone who was working-class and proud of it. In this film, it's a character's name, but for some reason, I've always associated this film with "Breaking Away" until I saw this.

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[–] ccr1633 14 years ago

Now that you bring up the word "cutter," I have wondered how commonly that word was used back in the day to describe a general blue-collar guy, as opposed to stone cutters only. Maybe it's just a midwest thing? I grew up near the west coast and later lived on the east coast, and never heard this term used as part of the local vernacular.

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[–] WarpedRecord 13 years ago

I grew up in the Midwest, and "cutter" certainly seemed to be used by people to describe themselves there even though they didn't work in the masonry industry. Of course, I mostly hung around with film geeks, so it was probably more of a fan's affectation.

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[–] allenrogerj 13 years ago

Canby also seemed not to notice that Cutter is short of an arm as well as a leg and eye.
In fairness, it reads as if he didn't have time to think about it: the film is a thriller that refuses to be a thriller and that offers none of the consolations of the thriller. It's also a psychological study of egotism and self-destruction.

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[–] london777 8 years ago

I agree with most of what he wrote, especially about Passer throwing away a promising career after coming to the USA.

It is sloppily written, with some smart-ass cracks, and could have done with an edit.

The remark about Eichhorn acting as if she is in a different movie is very perceptive though.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Canby was a newspaper critic on deadline, and as such, probably had to move quick with first impressions. Often newspaper critic reviews prove to be missing key points because the critics (then at least) had no ability to rewind or check a scene.

So you end up with a "quick skim" based mainly on the critic's own like or dislikes.

In movie critic history, there was a rather historic year in 1967, when Bonnie and Clyde came out:

Newsweek critic Joe Morgenstern first gave B and C a pan, then -- after watching it turn into a big hit on a RE-release a few months later -- took out space in Newsweek to say "I was wrong, I didn't understand it."

Meanwhile, the venerable New York Times critic Bosley Crowther -- who had been reviewing movies since the forties -- gave B and C a BIG diss ("For the moron trade") and, after some back channel agitating by Warren Beatty and the film intelligentsia...Bosley was fired(er, moved to "guest critic" status.) A woman named Renata Adler took over for a short while but Vincent Canby got the job soon after that.

I recall being a bit charmed that Canby proved to be such a fan of Alfred Hitchcock that when Hitchcock released his late-career flop "Topaz"(1969), Canby declared it "Alfred Hitchcock at his best," and named Topaz one of the best films of 1969. I'm a Hitchcock fan, but even I was amazed that Canby was that complimentary towards the film. Canby raved about Hitchcock's next movie, Frenzy -- but everybody else did, too. Canby drew some feminist ire , though , for a review that seemed to take the rape-murders in the film too lightly. Canby also praised Hitchcock's final, flawed film, Family Plot.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I raise Canby's "Hitchcock raves"(in two cases towards films that other critics found bad) because...well, that was what he LIKED. Its sort of funny that while Bosley Crowther got fired for being too "old fashioned," Canby proved to be kind of old fashioned, too.

Canby NOT liking "Cutters' Way" is as mystifying to me as his liking Topaz. Ultimately with film critics, its usually about their personal feelings towards films and filmmakers. "Cutter's Way" is small scale, character-driven and a bit meandering, but it is full of feeling and atmosphere -- its take on the rarely seen California coastal city of Santa Barbara(very rich but with some hardscrabble folks there, too -- at least then) is very interesting. Lisa Eichhorn...whose career was not very long -- is a very unique presence in the film with her sad, wobbly voice, her air of drunken stupor suddenly exploding into rage, and a kind of "borderline beauty."

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[–] ccr1633 (1523) 2 years ago

Canby NOT liking "Cutters' Way" is as mystifying to me as his liking Topaz. Ultimately with film critics, its usually about their personal feelings towards films and filmmakers.

I wonder if Cutter's Way suffered from bad timing, bringing up the rear in a long run of films from the 70s and 80s that were deeply cynical - if not conspiratorial - about the powers that be. It may have been cynicism fatigue. Sometimes excellent films happen to get released just when audience tastes shift dramatically. A prime example is John Carpenter's The Thing, the masterpiece that ruined his career.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I wonder if Cutter's Way suffered from bad timing, bringing up the rear in a long run of films from the 70s and 80s that were deeply cynical - if not conspiratorial - about the powers that be. It may have been cynicism fatigue. Sometimes excellent films happen to get released just when audience tastes shift dramatically.

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All of that is entirely possible. By 1980, we were well into the launch of the "Lucas-Spielberg era"(with Spielberg more active than Lucas), with a lot of happy endings, and a real focus on teenage audiences. Cynical 70's cinema was being given a rest. Example: in 1982 Jack Nicholson tried to make a "downbeat" movie about the border patrol (called "The Border," natch) in the tradition of his 70's downers like The Last Detail, Chinatown and Cuckoo's Nest -- and the studio forced a happy ending on it and it STILL bombed. And Nicholson had to re-think his career.

Speaking of Cuckoo's Nest, Cutter's Way is the only movie I can recall with the same musical composer as Cuckoo's Nest -- and hence, the two movies rather have the same "musical mood" and Nicholson's doomed hero in Cuckoo's Nest finds linkage to John Heard's doomed hero in Cutter's Way.

Funny thing about Canby's review: it seems to me that it could fit everything from The Long Goodbye in 1973 to "Inherent Vice" in 2014 if one wanted to attack the "plotless mystery'" of these films(well, they HAVE plots, but the plots down't matter much.)

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A prime example is John Carpenter's The Thing, the masterpiece that ruined his career.

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An interesting "swerve." The Thing was, I supposed a "seventies downer" in mood, but very much in accord with the special effects/sci fi/fantasy surge of Lucas-Spielberg(with Alien as the "dark connection.") I didn't know that The Thing ruined Carpenter's career. I guess it did -- he didn't make many studio pictures with big budgets after that ("Starman" maybe -- and it was NICE.)

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[–] Owlwise (1535) 2 years ago

A smart, thoughtful comment, and I pretty much agree with you. Cutter's Way is one of those great lost (or nearly lost) films that had the misfortune to come out at just the wrong time, I'd say. The above discussion makes me want to watch it again now.

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[–] ccr1633 (1523) 2 years ago

An interesting "swerve." The Thing was, I supposed a "seventies downer" in mood, but very much in accord with the special effects/sci fi/fantasy surge of Lucas-Spielberg(with Alien as the "dark connection.") I didn't know that The Thing ruined Carpenter's career.

I was relishing a bit of hyperbole in saying The Thing "ruined" Carpenter's career, but it certainly derailed him and shook his confidence. He churned out some great films afterwards like They Live, Starman, and Big Trouble in Little China (which suffered a fate similar to The Thing). But for his 1982 horror innovation he was called a "pornographer of violence" and hostile to women for their absence (sparing them the most gruesome deaths in cinematic history is apparently insulting). As I'm sure you know, it was released a couple weeks after the cloying California suburb alien fantasy ET. The new morning in America, and a new evening with cute extraterrestrials on flying tricycles illuminated by dreamy moonlight. Carpenter has spoken at length about how wrecked he was by the critics reaction as well as the meagre box office receipts. Of course, Cutter's Way didn't suffer under the weight of big budget expectations, but I think both films drowned in the same tidal wave that swept The Clash out to sea and left WHAM in its wake.

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[–] ccr1633 (1523) 2 years ago

Speaking of Cuckoo's Nest, Cutter's Way is the only movie I can recall with the same musical composer as Cuckoo's Nest -- and hence, the two movies rather have the same "musical mood" and Nicholson's doomed hero in Cuckoo's Nest finds linkage to John Heard's doomed hero in Cutter's Way.

I remember this observation of yours from a couple years ago. It's funny because I had noticed the musical similarities to Cuckoo's nest and chalked it up to the musical zeitgeist of that period. But I hadn't noticed it was the same composer! Nitzsche had one hell of a prolific career. In addition to his film soundtracks, he also produced for Neil Young's go-to backup band, Crazy Horse, as well as Graham Parker's "Squeezing Out Sparks," one of my all-time favorites.

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[–] Interlepos (1807) 4 years ago

Canby was wrong about Heaven's Gate also (he famously dismissed it), but right about Scarface (one of the few critics who initially gave it a positive review).

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