Chicago Film Society Presents: CUTTER'S WAY (Ivan Passer, 1981) on 35mm

Wednesday, January 31 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU CUTTER’S WAY Directed by Ivan Passer • 1981 Overeducated gigolo Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) spends his days tooling around Santa Barbara, half-heartedly hawking yachts to the polo set and hanging out with his washout buddies, who all share the bruised affect of Weather Underground comrades keeping their heads down in the straight world. Bone’s best friend Alex Cutter (John Heard) is a real piece of work: a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged Vietnam veteran with a chip on his shoulder and an inexhaustible array of paranoid schemes on his mind. (“I haven’t even begun to let my imagination loose on this one,” Cutter says of one nascent conspiracy theory, as if flinging open the doors to his artist’s studio.) By contrast, Cutter’s wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn, staggering) sees the world so clearly that she can only bear to get through the day in an alcoholic stupor, fleetingly enlivened by fantasies of boning Rich Bone. What could shake them all loose? How about a dead girl stuffed in a trash can, probably the handiwork of the local oil magnate who owns half the town, routinely orders assassinations, and may as well stand in for the shadowy forces responsible for US military adventures in Vietnam? Soon enough Cutter and Bone are sleepwalking into a hand-crafted extortion scheme to smoke out the killer. Less a taut who-done-it thriller than a stoner’s hazy who-done-what-again contraption, Cutter’s Way nails the aimless amble of a Santa Barbara afternoon and the hopeless vibe of the early Reagan era. Czech director Ivan Passer’s all-American fever dream was fumbled by United Artists and pulled from theaters after a week — probably some kind of coverup. (KW) 109 min • United Artists Classics • 35mm from Park Circus Preceded by: “Uncommon Valor” (Kendrick W. Williams, 1955) – 10 min – 35mm

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