Cutter’s Way (1981): Passer, paranoia and the *other* great Vietnam-vet vigilante movie

Asked about the ambiguous plot of his 1976 neo-noir Night Moves, Arthur Penn shrugged “We’re part of a generation that knows there are no solutions”. He didn’t reveal what was on his mind, but it’s pretty easy to guess. The generation who grew up in the 1960s and 70s were dragged into the world of conspiracy and cover-up first by the Kennedy assassination, then by the other Kennedy assassination. Even the ostensible triumph of Nixon’s resignation required the exposure of a very murky conspiracy, one which begged further questions about what else might be going on in the American deep state. Hanging over it all was the Vietnam war, a national trauma which challenged the conspiracists’ faith that the truth will set you free: the Pentagon Papers were published in one of the biggest and most prestigious newspapers in the country, and the war still staggered on for another four years. It’s this sense of unfinished business, the idea that the sunshine of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” wasn’t enough to banish all the Vietnam gloom, that powers Cutter’s Way, a major cult crime drama by Ivan Passer now reissued on UHD Blu-Ray by Radiance Films.

Not for the last time in his career, Jeff Bridges plays the more easy-going half of a buddy duo with a wired, angry Vietnam veteran, but banish all thoughts of The Big Lebowski. The Dude maintained a holy innocence even in the most sordid environments, but Richard Bone, his character here, is a gigolo who spends his nights drinking with John Heard’s Cutter. Heard’s epochal performances makes Cutter one of the screen’s great unforgettable monsters, a twisted, permanently ranting drink-driver who looses some serious racial slurs in his first appearance. You prime yourself to dismiss the film as having dated badly, as being unintentionally offensive by modern standards. But Cutter is never unintentionally offensive. Disabled and traumatised after his experiences in combat, he tries as hard as he can to alienate and appall everyone he meets, to the extent where Bone’s friendship with him resembles an act of self-harm.

I realise that describing it this way makes Cutter’s Way sound like the cinema equivalent of every hack comedian’s favourite way to avoid critical analysis – “Oh, I offend everyone equally”. But the film is clear: Cutter is actually spiralling. Heard is magnetic in the role, but it’s not the magnetism of a cool, rebellious anti-hero, it’s the can’t-look-away queasy magnetism of a car accident. (That metaphor becomes wincingly literal when Cutter tries to park on Bone’s front after a drink) For a while, Cutter is simply a menace to those around him, albeit a menace prone to moments of brutal lucidity about American imperialism. Then Bone becomes a suspect in a murder, and Cutter has a terrible focus for his paranoid, lacerating imagination.

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Cutter’s Way is a character study, then, and it’s also a murder mystery. The grand tradition of wrong-man mysteries from Hitchcock to Wake Up Dead Man stipulates that we should never suspect the person who the authorities target, and so it proves here. Despite his shady profession and questionable taste in friends, Richard Bone is nevertheless played by Jeff Bridges at his golden-boy best, so we happily assume he’s not guilty. Cutter’s assumptions are more open to interpretation. It’s worth noting that a few years earlier Paul Schrader had penned his own screenplay about a disabled Vietnam veteran on a revenge spree, Rolling Thunder, a reworking of themes from his definitive ‘nam-vet vigilante script Taxi Driver. Unlike Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder had producers who blanched at making a film with an openly racist protagonist, and Schrader said this neutered his script’s critique of vigilantism: “All his racism from his childhood and Vietnam comes out, and at the ending of the film there’s an indiscriminate slaughter of Mexicans, meant as some kind of metaphor for American racism in Vietnam.” (Schrader on Schrader, ed. Kevin Jackson, p. 121)

Unlike Rolling Thunder‘s Charles Rane, Alex Cutter’s racism is skin-deep. His true colours can be gauged by the tirade he unleashes at a parade honouring California’s Native and Mexican heritage: “Happy padres, happy Indians, wiped out in less than two hundred years by disease and forced labour.” Later on, he’s even blunter, saying that the only understandable response to watching news footage of the war he fought in is to think “I hate the United States of America”. These sentiments are unlikely to be found in a modern studio movie, given the consolidation of all mainstream US media under an ever-shrinking number of regime-loyalist families. But he has something of Charles Rane’s habit of displacing his anger into other causes. When he begins to suspect a wealthy local man of committing the crime his friend is being investigated for, is he really convinced this is the truth, or is he pursuing a proxy war against the blue-blooded elite class who sent him to war then left him to rot? Underneath its ever-shifting genre identity – neo-noir, abrasive hangout movie, buddy movie, vigilante movie – the film is ultimately asking a question that couldn’t be more relevant, either for its time or right now: who is a hero, and what is a heroic cause? Can you have one without the other?

It’s a great film, and it comes from an unusual source. Ivan Passer was part of that great generation of Czech and Slovak directors who came up in the 1950s and 60s, and whose careers in their homeland were often cut short by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The extremely collaborative nature of the Czechoslovak New Wave means it’s easy to overlook major talents, and Passer is a case in point. His countryman Milos Forman is rightly remembered as a great film-maker both in his own country and in the United States, but it’s too often forgotten that most of his Czech films – including classics The Fireman’s Ball and Loves of a Blonde – were co-written with Passer. As a director, Passer only managed one film in his home country before fleeing. A light, ironic comedy set in the world of classical music, Intimate Lighting could not be more different from Cutter’s Way – and yet it was a screening of that film which persuaded United Artists to hire Passer for this film. Some mysteries, clearly, would challenge even Alex Cutter’s ability to spin explanations for them.

Radiance’s disc is based on a brand-new 4K scan of the original camera negative, and it has a hefty new extra in the form of 42-minute documentary Piety, Patriotism and Violence: The Legacy of Cutter and Bone. It carries over a lot of the extras from the 2022 Region A release, including an introduction by Jeff Bridges, commentaries and interviews including ones with Passer, screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin and producer Paul Gurian. As is the norm with Radiance, there’s also a limited-edition booklet with newly-commissioned writing. What struck me is how popular the film is among novelists: George Pelicanos, Matthew Specktor, Megan Abbott and Jordan Harper all show up to sing the film’s praises, along with that most crime-fiction-literate of directors Bertrand Tavernier. Something about the film’s ambiguity and psychological depth clearly speaks to them. It’s not, perhaps, a film you’ll love on first watch, but it’s rattled around my head ever since I first saw it, and I already can’t wait to watch it again.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – CUTTER’S WAY