Review: The Travelling Executioner

Stacy Keach stars as the title character, a former prison inmate now working for The Man, who travels from town to town in the early 1900s with a portable electrocution device to carry out the government’s executions. Seemingly more of a huckster than an instrument of the law, Keach nonetheless seems to take pride in his work, and tries to calmly take his ‘customers’ on their final journey to ‘the fields of Ambrosia’. His latest assignment is executing Marianna Hill and her fellow immigrant brother (Stefan Gierasch). The latter goes smoothly, however legalities see Hill gaining a temporary stalling in her execution. In the meantime, Keach starts to develop romantic feelings for her, and he also takes up an apprentice in young Bud Cort. M. Emmet Walsh plays the sleazy-looking prison warden and Charles Tyner plays a local yokel.

 

A terrific, colourful performance by Stacy Keach can’t even come close to saving this 1970 nonsense from director Jack Smight (“No Way to Treat a Lady”, “Harper”) and screenwriter Garrie Bateson (whose only other work appears to be teleplays for episodes of “Night Gallery” and “Mission: Impossible”). Indicative of the worst in 70s filmmaking, the decade was just as known for exciting and emerging filmmakers as it was for annoying, pretentious pieces of shit like this.

 

The title is unseemly and the tone is weirdly light-hearted (or at least black comedy), it’s all kind of off-putting, really. It’s a mess. He’s not quite Burt Lancaster in “Elmer Gantry” (seemingly one of the film’s inspirations), but Keach tries really, really hard. He’s much, much better than the film deserves. He kinda made me feel something in his final speech, but the contrived manner of how he gets to this place prevents the moment from truly working. It’s a positively stupid, contrived finale.

 

There’s some interesting names and faces here, but the least interesting ones (the incredibly boring Marianna Hill in particular, and a young Bud Cort) are given the most screen time. We’re supposed to see something in Hill that might make us (and the lead character) want to spare her, but she’s a woefully uninteresting actress playing a decidedly unsympathetic character. Meanwhile, my favourite film composer Jerry Goldsmith (“The Omen”, “Chinatown”, “Star Trek: First Contact”) delivers what may be his worst-ever score. No, it’s not an awful score, it’s just that this is the one time where I’ve felt he was phoning it in. It’s nondescript.

 

With a more serious approach and a tighter focus, this might’ve been an interesting look at the inner workings of those who carry out the State’s harsh justice. Unfortunately, what we get is aimless, rambling, weird, and pretentious in the extreme. With this subject matter and strange approach, and with character actor Keach taking the lead in a cast that also features flavours of the month Marianna Hill and Bud Cort, you can see why no one ever talks about this one. You can also see why no one wanted to talk about it on original release, either. It’s weird enough that it might have a handful of defenders, I suppose.

 

Rating: D+