ROAD GAMES 1981

Versatile actor of film and stage Stacy Keach plays the poetic everyman Pat Quid who is driving a semi across Australia carting a truckload of meat, pig carcasses specifically, due to the high demand as there is a meat strike going on. As in any good traveler mystery, he encounters a variety of odd characters who periodically pop up time and again, as if they are all trapped in some kind of desert purgatory.

Along the way, there are also the occasional hitchhikers who are traveling on the same highway. Pat and his trusted companion Boswell, a dingo, like to occupy his time playing word games to make the journey more stimulating.

He likes to imagine the identities of other people on the road, guessing what they do for a living.

Stopping over to sleep at a motel one night, he loses his room to a mysterious guy in a dark green van who has picked up a foxy young hitchhiker. A girl Quid had decided to pass up along the way, as it is not his practice to pick up hitchhikers because it is against regulations.

That night he sleeps in the back of his cab but is aroused at 4 am by the garbage trucks who have come to pick up the motel trash. Boswell is sniffing around the plastic rubbish bags, chewing at whatever smells tempting on the inside.

Strangely up too, is the guy from the dark green van, who is watching out the window to see that the collectors are picking up the garbage.

The night before, we witness him murdering the young girl passenger that he brings to the motel. Most likely he has disposed of her body in the bags set out on the curb.

After seeing Green Van Man on the road, burying another garbage bag, and once Quid sees a cooler or ‘lunch box’ on the guys front seat, which is big enough to hold a human head, Quid puts a few things together and decides that this guy is probably the serial killer that the news has been talking about.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays Pamela ‘Hitch’ Rushworth a hitchhiker Quid finally picks up after the third time seeing her on the side of the same road.’Third time lucky!’

The two form an amateur detective team, playing cat and mouse with the elusive Green Van Man as they begin to try and track the serial killer on their own. The chemistry between the two does not have the hallmark romanticism of a typically immortal Hitchcock pairing, Keach and Curtis are more working-class guts and grit and less polish and panache.

But in Quid’s pursuit of the Green Van Man, it brings him to the attention of the police, who then suspect him of being the killer. Throughout the film, Quid plays the alienated nice guy, who is misunderstood, and under suspicion.

Directed by Richard Franklin (Patrick 1978, Psycho II 1983)Based on an original story by Richard Franklin and adapted for the screen by Everett De Roche. Also starring Marion Edward as Madeleine ‘Frita’ Day and Grant Page as Smith or Jones the Green Van killer.

Since I’ve chosen this film as my contribution to Best Hitchcock Movies (That Hitchcock Never Made) I’d like to briefly cover a few of the most salient points that stick out for me the most.

Not least of which are the few obvious touts to Hitch himself: The casting of Janet Leigh’s  (1960 Psycho’s Marion Crane) daughter with actor Tony Curtis, the wonderfully androgynous Jamie Lee Curtis.

Curtis’s character Pamela has a nickname in the film which is ‘Hitch’ and Franklin actually directed Psycho II in 1983 which starred Anthony Perkins revisiting his iconic role as Norman Bates. Franklin obviously had an appreciation for the story and Hitchcock’s contribution to the mystery/suspense genre.

At one point in the film, Pamela in the back of Quid’s cab picks up a vintage Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine from the 60s.

The more significant allusions that can be drawn from the film are Keach’s role as Patrick Anthony Quid, using a Hitchcockian formula, ‘The Wrong Man.’

The police not only suspect him of the murders, but Quid becomes alienated by the rest of the hostile players in the film, even going as far as being set up by the real killer, not unlike Hitchcock’s later and quite starkly disturbing Frenzy 1972.

Starring Barry Foster as the criminally insane misogynist Robert Rusk, the necktie killer who rapes and strangles his female victims in what I feel Hitchcock lensed with an utter brutal realism that stays with you.

In Frenzy it is Jon Finch who plays Richard Ian Blaney the misunderstood working-class man who is falsely blamed for a series of murdered women. Blaney also becomes set up as a patsy by the killer, like Quid for the murders.

Unlike Frenzy’s lustful sex maniac who we get to see up close and personal, remember the hideous line… ‘lovely.’

Green Van Man maintains anonymity, a distance from us and the camera, so the intimacy of the plot is stifled and a line is drawn in the sand as far as understanding the killer’s identity any closer than his gloves, his guitar wire, and the dark green van.Which might be the point. Although, Robert Rusk was a fertile character that repulsed yet fascinates.

Missing is the profoundly evocative score from Bernard Herrmann. Road Games doesn’t utilize music as much to underscore its narrative. Although it’s sound editing is very key in various spots of the film to accentuate the sense of alienation that is pervasive in the film. Where Herrmann’s romantic scoring might guide the viewer along the way to either an empathetic moment or a suspenseful point in a film, the use of sound in Road Games is incorporated in a much more holistic way. And the film starts out quietly, bleakly, allowing Keach’s Pat Quid to stretch his characterization of a solitary man on a journey.

Another interesting motif of the film that utilizes some of the traditional stylizations of a Hitchcock film is the use of  The MacGuffin– The cooler or ‘lunch box’ that is frequently shown framed in one scene or another which is the possession of the Green Van Man, might or might not hold something of interest or relevance or could just be a big red herring. We wonder as does Quid, whether it holds the severed head of the foxy hitchhiker we see being murdered in the beginning of the film.

I found it interesting that our first awareness of the murders takes place in a motel, not unlike 1960s Psycho.

Also of interesting note is the use of the ‘Open Road’, expansive at times indicative of alienation and desolation, lending to ‘the traveler’ theme. Like Tippi Hedren in The Birds 1963.

I’m also reminded of the cinematic open landscapes as seen in North by Northwest 1959, with its desert environment. While not a single-engine plane as the nefarious mode of transportation in pursuit, Quid is often swallowed up by the vast Australian expanse, being taunted by a maniac in a dark green van that is playing cat and mouse with the protagonist!

And again with the character of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) traveling from Arizona attempting to escape the mundane ticking of her working-class existence. Running away after having stolen a large sum of money from one of the Bank’s clients. Hoping to be together with her lover Sam Loomis ( John Gavin.)Unfortunately stumbling onto yet another desolate hostile environment that is hidden underneath quiet American family values and a nice mama’s boy named Norman Bates.

Hitchcock often used actors who could be perceived as an ‘everyman’ Quid reiterates this line several times in the film, “Just because I drive a truck doesn’t mean I”m a truck driver.” He’s fair and ethical and is just looking to do his job, but won’t be defined by anyone else’s standards.

The Lighting has the certain feel of a Hitchcock thriller, the Neo-Noirish ambient colors, highlighting only the ‘object’ the director wants us to see, with everything else framed within shadow. The obscuring of a purposefully arranged set with an emphasis on the specific players being lit in close up. And colors used specifically to accentuate a mood. The use of color in Road Games helps develop the feeling of a surreal type of desolation.

Right from the beginning of the film, Quid the protagonist, starts out in conflict with this mysterious stranger in the dark green van. The game of cat and mouse begins.

“First he steals my girl and then he steals my bed"¦ ”

“I hope she steals his wallet. I bet she doesn’t even wait to take her socks off.

Continue reading “Road Games (1981) – “Cast to the wind"¦thy ghastly sin” for the Best Hitchcock Movies (That Hitchcock Never Made) blogathon July 7-13″ →