The “Man On the Run” genre is a popular one at the multiplex, transforming what audiences would like to think are benevolent law enforcement organizations into dangerous, nearly all-powerful obstacles for a hero – or at least an admirably clever villain – to run from, fight against and sometimes even overcome. The stakes are raised in every scene, since at any moment our heroes and anti-heroes could be caught or forced into an awesome car chase.
We don’t foresee many awesome car chases in Labor Day, Jason Reitman’s fugitive movie that arrives in theaters this weekend, but does a fugitive movie really need a car chase? What is the genre all about? And what, pray tell, is the best fugitive movie ever? We asked CraveOnline‘s four film critics to respond, and here’s what they came up with on this week’s installment of The Best Movie Ever.
Witney Seibold:
While the phrase “fugitive films” tend to instantly evoke images of a perhaps-innocent man on the run from Johnny Law, using his wits and resources to catch the realkiller, but whose actions only tend to make it look more and more like he is guilty (a series of tropes that is at least as old as Hitchcock), my own mind tends to stretch a little more toward Huckleberry Finn territory. The action-packed eluding of lawmen is perhaps less interesting, I feel, than the down-to-earth mechanics of living alone in the wilderness. The sense of isolation, the lam, and the reluctance to emerge into any sort of public area, even to find food. It seems to me that being a fugitive would be less about outwitting the police, and more about desperation and survival.
Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (the only film Laughton ever directed) not only has the appealing Huckleberry Finn fugitive story, as told through the eyes of two young children (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce) on the run from a wicked criminal who would either kill them or volunteer to be their father (both chilling outcomes), but we also have the fugitive story of the criminal himself (an indelible Robert Mitchum), a serial killer posing as a minister. Harry Powell, with LOVE and HATE tattooed across his knuckles (yes, this is where that comes form), marries lonely dowagers and then kills them to inherit their fortunes. He seems but one step away from the law, and he, in turn becomes a pursuer. The Night of the Hunter is a twisted horror flick, one of the first serial killer movies, and most certainly the most chilling fugitive film of all time.
Brian Formo:
How good is Badlands? So good that Bruce Springsteen once wrote a song about it. No, not his song “Badlands,” I’m taking about the titular track to the best freakin’ Bruce Springsteen album ever recorded, Nebraska. That album lead off with a song that Springsteen wrote after catching this flick on television and being so taken by Terrence Malick’s on-the-lam opus.
Why should I provide a synopsis when demo-tape Springsteen already strummed it:
I saw her standin’ on her front lawn, just a twirlin’ her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died
From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through the Badlands of Wyoming, I killed everything in my path
Sound like Natural Born Killers? All of these stories were based around the Charlie Starkweather mass murders of the 50s. But Malick’s film is so alive. The best moments in Badlands are asides: Sissy Spacek putting makeup on for the first time, Spacek looking through a stereopticon and describing worlds she’d never otherwise see, Spacek spelling words on the roof of her mouth; Martin Sheen strutting around in a white shirt, Sheen setting booby-traps in the woods and running around without his shirt as a combo Plains Indian and pre-Rambo Rambo.
She’s unprepared. He’s prepared… for something. Badlands is a simple story. It just happens to have murders in it. A lot of ‘em.
The esteemed and quotable French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard said all that he needed to make a movie was a gun and a girl. Give Malick a gun and he’ll give people a plot. While I’ve loved all of Malick’s films since, Badlands is the one that Malick haters can actually love.
One more thing about Springsteen’s fixation with Badlands. The Boss told Rolling Stone, ‘”Badlands’ – that’s a great title. But it’d be easy to blow it [by titling a song that]! I kept writing, and I kept writing and writing until I had a song that I felt deserved that title.” I think Malick did the same. This is his most lyrical script, his most accessible film. Like an outlaw in his filmography, it’s pretty much isolated and separate from the rest of his work. This engine is always pushing forward.
In most of Malick’s films, he tends to look at his feet. Here he looks at the road. It’s the Malick touches of narration that make Badlands soar (no, not the ethereal type he’d later whisper and ponder; Spacek’s narration is joyful, funny, human).
William Bibbiani:
I feel a little guilty saying that The Fugitive is “the best fugitive movie ever,” especially since only two weeks ago I said that Gladiator was the best gladiator movie. If it’s any consolation, Scary Movie isn’t the best scary movie ever, and seriously, screw Giallo. One of the worst giallo movies, ever. I swear.
But yes, I stand by The Fugitive, an exceptional, smart, impressively acted motion picture that takes the genre Alfred Hitchcock defined (rest assured, The 39 Steps, Saboteur and North by Northwest were my runners up) and imports it into the modern era. Andrew Davis’s film stars Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, wrongly convicted of killing his wife, escaping custody in a marvelously suspenseful train crash and going on the lam to find the one-armed man who was really responsible. The Fugitive offers thrills without succumbing to action movie clichés, emphasizing the ever-tightening net around its hero instead of throwing him into one implausible stunt after another (although there are two or three of them), and extra credit is given for the film’s attention to detail. Eating oranges and making IDs, Dr. Richard Kimble is smart enough to lay low and work diligently on every detail necessary to stay out of prison and solve his wife’s murder, and the playful pacing and overwhelming odds against him keep every little nuance exciting even when, technically, nothing all that “exciting” is going on.
And yet what puts The Fugitive over the top, at least compared to those Hitchcock classics it evokes, is the presence of a worthy antagonist for our man-on-the-run hero. No, not the villain (he’s shrouded in mystery), but the Federal Marshal who just happens to be assigned to the case: Deputy Samuel Gerard, played by a deservedly Oscar-winning Tommy Lee Jones. He’s a titan of professionalism, an enemy to Kimble not because he’s evil, but because he’s got a job to do and nothing will stop him from doing it right. “I didn’t kill my wife!” Richard Kimble cries. “I don’t care,” responds Deputy Gerard. And therein lies Kimble’s greatest problem.
The sequel, U.S. Marshals, opens with Gerard in a chicken costume. It goes downhill from there.
Fred Topel:
