Watch It: "Straight Time"
dir: Ulu Grosbard (1978)
Who would have guessed that Dustin Hoffman could so convincingly play an ex-con?
Ulu Grosbard’s uncompromising 1978 character study, Straight Time, is an extraordinarily sad little picture that can now be appreciated as a classic of the period. It’s perplexing that critics didn’t—and still don’t—make a bigger deal out of this movie. Although it’s one of the quietest crime stories you’ll ever see, the main character’s bottled-up rage is uniquely unsettling.
Hoffman has never given a better performance than he does in Straight Time, and he didn’t even get an Oscar nomination for his trouble. Hell, the movie barely even appeared in theaters. It took in a measly $9.9 million at the box office, then completely disappeared. Grease led the pack that year with $160 million, just to give you an idea of how badly this one tanked.
Hoffman is Max Dembo, a lifelong recidivist criminal who, when the picture opens, is being released from Folsom after doing six years on a burglary charge. Max has his government-issued jacket, a 70s-style silk shirt, and not much else to his name when he walks through the prison gates and hops a bus for Los Angeles.
When he reaches L.A., Max appears to be intent on finally finding a place for himself in society but quickly realizes that his parole officer, Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh), isn’t going to let him accomplish that on his own.
Their initial meeting in Frank’s office is awkward and embarrassing for Max. You can feel his intense humiliation as he’s being demeaned by yet another man who has the legal right to lord over him. The tight crack in Hoffman’s voice when he tries to respectfully respond to Frank’s suspicious questioning feels informed by years of systemic humiliation.
Not even Max’s halting romance with a law-abiding young woman (Theresa Russell, beautiful but listless as always) and a menial job at a canning factory convince Frank that things are heading in the right direction for Max. When Max’s dimwitted buddy, Willy (Gary Busey, who’s very good), shoots heroin in Max’s flophouse—an act that could get parolee Max another three years in the slammer—the downward spiral begins anew.
There’s an undercurrent of dread to this mostly very still picture, a sense that Max can’t possibly break free of criminal life even as he tries to turn himself around.
Owen Roizman's gritty cinematography (he also shot Network and The French Connection) doesn’t romanticize the situation. Roizman was a master of documentary textures. His unadorned images and the spot-on working-class production design by Stephen B. Grimes considerably heighten the overall sense of reality. This world seems lived-in by real people.
One of the more fascinating aspects of Jeffrey Boam’s script, which is adapted from Edward Bunker’s novel, No Beast So Fierce, is that on the surface Walsh’s character seems to be a standard-issue asshole. He’s not likable, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s only upon reflection that you realize he tries to cut Max a bit of slack here and there, and Max carelessly blows the chances he’s given.
You start to sense he doesn’t want to go straight. Crime is the only life, and the only excitement, he’s ever known.
Hoffman conveys Max’s hopelessness via a lost gaze and a clipped way of speaking that reflect the character’s years spent in a place where others are not to be trusted. Max truly opens up to no one, not even the woman who loves him.
Grosbard and Hoffman take you so far into a petty criminal’s mind, you actually empathize with him when he’s needlessly putting himself in danger. You wind up hating the parole officer, and Max’s sudden aggression toward him—believe me when I tell you, Frank gets his comeuppance for treating Max’s well-being as an afterthought—is a shocking moment of brutality and prison-style humiliation. It’s an incredibly satisfying scene, even if your satisfaction as a viewer means that you’re now playing on the wrong side of the law.
Of course, once Max pulls a violent number on his parole officer, he has no choice but to re-enter a life of crime. So he quickly hooks up with a former accomplice named Jerry (Harry Dean Stanton), who’s now got a wife, a pool, and a respectable job but really longs to be a shotgun man on yet another armed robbery.
The initial scene between Max and Jerry, in which Jerry gets his wife to go grab some beers in the kitchen before confiding in Max that his middle-class routine is sucking the life out of him, is another moment of soft spoken despair. Grosbard lets it all unfold in a single unbroken take that flawlessly moves between humor, compassion, and desperation in the course of 3 1/2 minutes. Both Hoffman and Stanton are terrific here.
It’s a remarkably well-written scene in a movie that contains a handful of great ones. In a way, it stands as a microcosm for the rest of the film. You soon realize that, even when things seem to be operating on an even keel, these characters are destined to rock the boat until it tips.
That’s the only way they can live.
It’s not long before Max and Jerry move from waving guns and cleaning out tills at convenience stores to robbing banks. These are not glamorous criminals. The holdups aren’t the usual Hollywood routine. You feel the rising adrenaline rush that’s driving the pair, but also their anxiety.
In the process, you discover that Max, who’s willing to violently retaliate against close friends who fail to accomplish their assigned tasks during a robbery, gets so jazzed by being in control of a situation he can’t stick to a plan himself. He gets greedy for both money and thrills.
One manic smash-and-grab at a high-end jewelry store, where Max loses any sense of the plan and keeps wildly breaking glass and grabbing up diamonds long after he and Jerry should be fleeing to the getaway car, is brilliantly edited for maximum tension.
This is yet another way that Grosbard pulls you into these people’s lives. There aren’t many crime movies in which you learn something about the criminals’ inner lives through their robbery technique. There's also a startling moment where Max steals a shotgun from a pawn shop and quietly whimpers to himself as he cradles the coveted weapon.
Again, Hoffman is spectacular in this picture, just incredibly intense. Nothing he does is overly mannered; this is about as far removed from Ratso Rizzo as you can get.
Max’s personal truth boils beneath the surface, even when he’s just warily watching another person speak. His explosions of violence are shocking not because they occur, but because you can’t tell exactly what might generate them. One tragic outburst involving Busey ranks with the most heartbreaking moments in all of 70s cinema.
Ironically, Straight Time was dumped by Warner Bros. after Hoffman, who was originally directing as well as starring, handed the reins over to Grosbard, then sued the studio when they wouldn’t allow some scenes to be re-shot. Hoffman is famous for being a pain-in-the-ass perfectionist on the set, and this time his meddling sank the picture’s release.
God only knows which scenes so offended him. There’s not a single misstep in Straight Time, aside from an utterly inappropriate score by David Shire, who must have watched the wrong movie before he hired a smooth-jazz saxophonist to do his bidding.
Luckily, the vast majority of the picture unfolds with no music at all, as it should. The emotions here are not telegraphed, so they don’t need music.
Hoffman and Grosbard trust the audience to connect with Max’s weaknesses and see him not as a failed human being but as someone who was never meant to win at all. The only world Max has ever known is a world of loss, so he sticks a .45 in his waistband and embraces the inevitable.
I love this movie