Fighting Mad

R.I.P., Mr. Fonda (1940-2019)

Producer Roger Corman's addition to the '70s backwoods thriller genre, 1976's FIGHTING MAD, takes a standard issue revenge story and aside from a few novel touches, doesn't really distinguish itself from many others of its ilk.  One significant difference is the involvement of Jonathan Demme, who wrote and directed the picture.  His work (at least his direction) here is well above average.  Were it not for him, it's likely I would've never bothered with this movie.  I've watched/endured countless potboilers in which someone, and often their family and friends, are wronged in a particularly grisly and vile fashion and then the protagonist exacts grisly and vile payback on the bad guys. You know, an hour and so many minutes of the hero's suffering and then the final ten minutes of violent reckoning.  Evil for evil?  Psychotic characters, mainly trading places?

You would think that an artist as thoughtful as Demme might explore the dilemmas vengeance surely wreaks.  Later in his career, for certain.  At this stage, Demme was still paying his dues and cranking out exploitation for Corman, who gave his stable of filmmakers a fair amount of freedom but required them to include requisite scenes of violence and nudity.  FIGHTING MAD has those, albeit fairly briefly.  The story is told with utter seriousness and there are indications its creator is making statements about capitalism and ecology, if not the corrosive nature and cycle of revenge. The film marches along, hitting the usual notes and then ends.  Is there anything there to inspire us to ponder the toxicity of such a horrible cycle?

Peter Fonda plays Tom Hunter, who leaves a failed marriage back in the big city and returns with his young son to the family horse ranch in rural Arkansas (nicely lensed by Michael W. Watkins) to help out his father and brother.  A developer named Pierce Crabtree (Philip Carey) has been strip mining the mountainous area and wants to develop it with shopping malls. The Hunters are some of the last holdouts and will suffer the dirty work of Crabtree's goons.  The local Sheriff (Harry Northup) seems fairly helpless, perhaps in Crabtree's pocket?  Tom also tries to rekindle an old romance with never-left-town gal Lorene (Lynn Lowry).

Tom is quickly established as a guy who doesn't back down, a good samaritan who will help strangers and neighbors alike against the Crabtree squad.  His character is honorable and likable, if one dimensional.  In a scene that prefaces some of Demme's later work, we get a tight close-up of Fonda's bespectacled face right before he takes some violent action.  The actor made several drive-in features in the '70s and in them comfortably inhabited hero and criminal alike.  From his father he inherited a certain presence, a movie star quality.  It would've been interesting if Demme had been the one who directed Fonda in the thoughtful ULEE'S GOLD all those years later (apologies to Victor Nunez).

Also increasingly characteristic of his later films, Demme fills this somewhat depressing tale with fine moments of characterization, brief but telling insights into townspeople, sometimes through their dialogue.  This is mostly true for the secondary characters - Tom and Lorene's tired flirtations that make way for tired arguments and reconciliations are fairly pat.

FIGHTING MAD is recommended particularly for Demme completists and students of 1970s exploitation cinema, though anyone looking for an action film that is crafted with more care than the usual drek might find a satisfying hour and a half.

P.S. Watch closely that band at the C & W watering hole the characters frequent.  Their final number is, ooh doggie, some strange stuff.