End of the Road

To really appreciate this film, It might be a case of "you had to be there", though I'll bet many viewers even in cinematically freewheeling 1970 had a rough time with END OF THE ROAD, an adaptation of John Barth's same named novel, written a decade earlier.  Co-writer/director Aram Avakian reset the story to the end of the sixties, when America's many ills seemed to dominate every headline.  Ills of violence abroad in Vietnam and on its own streets.  Assassinations.  Avakian opens his film with a hit and run collage of famous images seen in magazines and on television screens.  Meanwhile, a young man is seen leaving a college campus after graduation.  Are these images invading his brain? Explain why he stands in a train station for what appears to be a few days in a state of catatonia?

The man is named Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach).  He is eventually approached by another man who goes by "Dr. D" (James Earl Jones) and is able to break the spell by saying something naughty about Jacob's mother.   Dr. D will convince the man to come to his compound known as 'The Farm", an asylum for the insane.  Those who haven't found reality yet (or maybe they have).  Does Horner need treatment? Did his degree in English Lit. leave him unprepared for life? Will Dr. D's assaultive sound and light shows and bizarre rounds of questioning help him? Will Jacob resort to some of the therapeutic extremes he sees in other patients, ones in tutus hanging from crosses and having relations with chickens?

Like I said, this movie will be rough for many.  Even before the difficult to watch finale - a grisly abortion.  The film's marketing trumpeted its eccentricities, describing Avakian as "the quintessence of a newly successful breed of maverick, dropout filmmaker."  END OF THE ROAD did not find the audiences EASY RIDER did, but it is cited as being cut from the same cloth.  Avakian's film rather leans toward the more obscure titles of the era that are difficult to find now.  Unless, as Warner Brothers did with this movie, a new print is remastered when current filmmakers sing praises.  That never hurts. 

  

After Jacob is deemed "cured" he takes a teaching gig at a college and befriends fellow instructor Joe Morgan (Harris Yulin), a Scoutmaster who likes to point guns at himself in the mirror and masturbate while quoting Shakespeare.  The Bard is actually quoted numerous times in this movie.  Soon, Jacob is having an affair with Joe's lonely, abused wife Rennie (Dorothy Tristan), which inevitably goes horribly wrong.  As this bit of plot forms, END OF THE ROAD takes a quieter, less audacious approach, though no less disturbing.  What Avakian and head screenwriter - the greatly respected Terry Southern - intended with this storyline and how it relates to the not exactly subtle political subtext is ripe for discussion. 

END OF THE ROAD, originally classified with an X-rating, will work best for those who crave adventurous movie watching.  Are curious about the time period.  That carried me a ways, and I dig experimental cinema, but in the end I'm not sure if this is pretentious swill or utter genius.  A graduate thesis with a budget.   There's evidence from all sides.  The performances are quite good (and you've never seen Jones quite like this in any other movie).  Director of photography Gordon Willis lends his painterly approach, curiously favoring (more than usual) very dark and shadowy palates.