End of the Road (1970)
Genre: Offbeat Comedy Drama
Country: USA | Director: Aram Avakian
Language: English | Subtitles: English (.srt file)
Aspect ratio: Widescreen 1.85:1 | Length: 110mn
Dvdrip H264 Mkv – 866×502 – 23.976fps – 1.46gb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065692/
After a catatonic episode on a railway station platform, Jacob Horner is taken to “The Farm”, a bizarre insane asylum run by Doctor D. After being cured, Jacob takes a job as an English lecturer and begins a disastrous affair with Rennie, the wife of a colleague.
In the late 60’s up until the late 70’s Stacy Keach appeared with pleasing regularity in a sizable volume of seriously offbeat try-and-do-whatever defiantly unconventional and noncommercial oddball indie movies. These pictures include John Huston’s beautifully downbeat “Fat City,” the gloomy dope addict feature “Watched,” the wonderfully outré “The Ninth Configuration,” Jack Starrett’s delightfully giddy’n’quirky crime romp “The Dion Brothers,” and this truly idiosyncratic cinematic marvel of deeply depressed late 60’s anarchy, disillusionment and spiritual malaise, which is arguably the strangest of the whole kooky bunch.
Keach delivers a typically all-out loopy performance that’s all fried nerves, eroding mental stability and spaced-out behavior as Jack Horner, a recent dejected college graduate who seeks psychological help from wacko unorthodox maverick shrink Doctor D (an extraordinarily nutty turn by a bearded, slender James Earl Jones). Doctor D encourages Jack to “do his own thing,” a treatment which prompts Jack to get a job at a college as an English professor. Pretty soon Jack is having an adulteress fling with the neglected unhappy wife (superbly played by Dorothy Tristan) of a crazed, pompous colleague (marvelously essayed to smug, callous perfection by Harris Yulin in his film debut), a precarious situation which begets tragic consequences for all concerned.
Addressing such pertinent topics as loss of identity, commonplace violence in contemporary society, abortion, drug use, infidelity, insanity and the sheer lunacy and bleak emptiness of middle class American existence with a bracing and fiercely pointed sense of sardonic humor, this grim social satire that was co-written by Terry Southern and garishly shot by Gordon Willis never lets up on its nihilistic, everything’s-going-to-hell acid-soaked tone, thus making for a properly harsh, often funny and frequently provocative ridicule of trippy uninhibited 60’s excess and messed-upness.
Any chance for “Fat City” also with the great Stacy Keach? Thanks.