Review: Every Which Way But Loose

Clint Eastwood plays a bare-knuckle fighter and trucker with an orangutan sidekick named Clyde. Sondra Locke plays a country singer Eastwood gets involved with, whilst Geoffrey Lewis plays Eastwood’s good buddy and fight promoter, and Ruth Gordon is his cranky old mother. Along the way, Clint gets on the wrong side of some bikers (including Roy Jenson, Bill McKinney, and John Quade), as well as Gregory Walcott’s pissed-off cop. Joyce Jameson turns up briefly as a waitress. Beverly D’Angelo plays a love interest for Lewis.

 

In the late 70s and early 80s Clint Eastwood was such a big star that audiences would flock to see him in almost anything, including two orangutan buddy movies. This 1978 film from director James Fargo (“The Enforcer”, “Caravans”, “Forced Vengeance”) was the first and worst of the two films, both of which are frankly pretty awful “Smokey and the Bandit” variants. Yeah, substitute Clyde the Orangutan for Sally Field, bare-knuckle fighting for beer-running, and bikers for antagonistic cops, and you’ve got the same damn movie, only much, much worse. It’s even got a country and western theme song, albeit a middle of the road one unlike the terrific ones for “Smokey and the Bandit” and the similar “Convoy”. There’s an audience for the film, it was a box-office hit after all. I found it loud, heavy-handed, occasionally miscast, and frankly rather boring.

 

Scripted by Jeremy Joe Kronsberg (the similar-sounding “Going Ape!”), the highlight of the film occurs 10 minutes in when Clint gets beat up by the orangutan. It’s mostly downhill from there, despite fine work by Geoffrey Lewis and a lively cameo by Beverly D’Angelo. And why is a film with Clint Eastwood and an orangutan nearly two hours long? Clint is in fine physical shape and on paper seems like perfect casting, but funny he ain’t. At least not the kind of funny that this film needs, and he’s not especially charming, either. He looks as bored as I was. Clint’s constantly furrowed-browed performance is as one-note as the rest of the film, and in the case of Ruth Gordon that note is played really, really loudly. Even the monkey is mostly dull, the filmmakers never give it anything clever to do or say outside of beating Clint up early on. Simply having a monkey around is apparently supposed to be inherently funny. It’s not. As for Sondra Locke, I’ve never understood the appeal. She’s very odd, can’t sing (I’m assuming that’s her, if not it’s even worse), and neither she nor her character has any charm or likeability whatsoever. She’s far too brittle for the film. Worse, the screenplay has no idea what to do with her character. She gets lost in the shuffle after a while, and is never once truly redeemed. She’s a cold fish from start to finish. She ends up a complete waste of time for not only Clint’s character, but the audience, too. And she’s our leading lady and central love interest for Clint (in real-life for a while, too). Yeah, so that’s a problem. Veteran movie henchmen Bill McKinney, John Quade, and Roy Jenson are thoroughly wasted in heavy-handed slapstick Wile E. Coyote roles as dopey bikers. About the only interest I had here was in spotting the likes of Joyce Jameson (“The Comedy of Terrors”, “Death Race 2000”), “Plan 9 From Outer Space” star Gregory Walcott (once again getting bested by Clint, a recurring gag in Clint vehicles it seems), and the durable Hank Worden in bit roles. The rest was a yelling Ruth Gordon firing her shotgun at Gomer Pyle bikers, a monkey just…being there, an African-American character who actually utters the phrase ‘Feets, don’t fail me now!’, and Clint having both a Tarzan yell moment and an Ennio Morricone musical cue gag. Ugh, that last one was only slightly funnier in the otherwise much better “Kelly’s Heroes”. I did like the ending though, it’s actually rather interesting. Shame it’s attached to such a stupid and boring film.

 

The stars are unlikeable, the supporting cast is full of interesting people in mostly very  uninteresting roles, and the comedy is boring, loud, and stupid. If a monkey being a monkey and Ruth Gordon saying ‘Goddamn’ every two seconds at the top of her lungs are your idea of champagne comedy, this one’s for you. I found it incredibly boring, though far from Eastwood’s worst film, sadly. Now if someone had made a movie about Geoffrey Lewis and Beverly D’Angelo…

 

Rating: D+