Every Which Way But Loose (1978)
Directed by James Fargo
Written by Jeremey Joe Kronsberg
Cinematography by Rexford L. Metz
Music by Steve Dorff
Edited by Joel Cox and Ferris Webster
Starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, Beverly D'Angelo and Ruth Gordon
Originally released December 20th, 1978.
I've been on a bit of a western kick since, oh, I don't know, birth. In my eternal search for movies featuring dusty men with leathery chaps and even more leathery faces riding their way through the desert in the name of colonialism, I unsurprisingly found myself scrolling through Clint Eastwood's
IMDB page. He's been a staple of American popular culture since the early '60s, squinting in some truly great films;
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966),
Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and the underrated classic that I am 100% serious about,
Paint Your Wagon (1969). And that's just the tip of the gun slinging, poncho flipping, spur jingling iceberg that is Clint's early career. But as time went on, and his once beautiful head of hair came off, he understandably started branching out. After all, you can't play the cheroot that waddles like a man forever, right? This attempt to diversify his career (and I mean diversify in the MOST republican sense of the word) meant he started taking roles that would still let him be 'tough', still let him promote guns, and generally, still put him in the American West, but that weren't necessarily westerns.
Every Which Way But Loose is a great example of a painfully type cast character actor who's cultural cache would force him to write movie checks that his acting ass couldn't really cash. This movie is not funny enough to be a comedy, not exciting enough to be an actioner/thriller, and there aren't enough fun, ape-related antics to call this an animal movie. All in all,
EWWBL is a boring 2 hours of thinly veiled gun propaganda featuring jarringly incongruent cinematography, some very pedestrian misogyny, and an underutilized orangutan who is ultimately, the star of the dang show.
Normally for a movie like this, I wouldn't be super critical of the cinematography. After all, we're here for monkey jokes and very VERY
mediocre country music, not art! But everything about
EWWBL was so underwhelming and bland, I've had to dig a little deeper than I'd like to. For the most part, this movie is shot almost like a late 70's film-by-numbers. It looks just like all its contemporaries;
Smokey and the Bandit (1977),
Convoy (1978),
The Electric Horseman (1979), etc. They share a commonality in shooting profiles in that they are comprised mostly of medium shots. The lighting is natural where possible, and mimics natural elsewhere. The colour palette is muted overall with the occasional deviation for narrative emphasis. They're also all shot in a 1.85 aspect ratio. Now, that's the most commonly used aspect in film, but sharing an aspect ratio does tend to tie the appearance of films that already look similar even closer together. So
EWWBL visually blends in with its peers quite well, save for one area where someone got creative seemingly independent of the rest of the production. All the
fight sequences (of which there are so, so many) are shot with a combination of locked off medium/long shots and very shaky handheld medium/close-ups. The shots on their own are pretty cool and very effective but don't at all blend well with the visual tone of the rest of the movie. The result is a handful of scenes that are pretty integral to the story that looks sloppily edited and out of place. And it's a shame because Clint is topless in most of those scenes, and at 48, he was still a snack (if you can look past his bigoted politics and offensively bland personality).
Most movies treat women like shit. Because, as we should all know by now, everyone hates women. It's one of the most enduring unifying characteristics of the human species. So in the majority of movies throughout history and worldwide, the stories depicted reflect this legacy of hatred, being both influenced by it and perpetuating it. This movie is no exception. As both a person who loves movies and a woman, I'm always keenly aware of what the people making a movie think of women (probably more so than they are). This movie presents Clint's character, Philo, as an easy-going trucker who doesn't talk much, but is good in a fist fight because...toxic masculinity? He's also "good with the ladies". He's essentially big, tough, quiet slut. The first time we see him interact with a woman, he drops a cigarette butt in her soup because she doesn't want to sleep with him, so he's also a dick. However, that scene is played for laughs, because in rape culture, she's a bitch for refusing him and got what she deserved. When Philo meets Lynn (Sondra Locke), a seemingly good-natured singer in a bar band with an abusive boyfriend, the serial dater is smitten. Philo's boinking around is applied to his character as a badge of honour. But when Lynn is all over him right away, we as an audience are meant to distrust her forwardness. And she turns out to be an antagonist in the story, manipulating Philo into buying her stuff and then skipping town. It's a very common trope, that a man's active sex life is impressive, and a woman's is shameful. This character also starts out the victim of her abusive partner and is then narratively switched to a villain. Generally, women are either victims or villains in film. Women have almost no screen time in
EWWBL and never share lines with each other. There's a litany of other examples, but it's honestly a waste of my time to devote this much critical effort to such a crappy movie, so let's move on. Real quick though, they also cast and absolutely waste the talents of a young Beverly D'Angelo as a supporting character (again only serving her male counterpart's narrative), as she became one of the funniest character actors of the 20th century. Nice going, guys.
So I'm sure you're all wondering when we're going address the orangutan in the room. I've comfortably been able to write a fair bit about
EWWBL without even mentioning the ape. That's how little he features in this ill-fated journey. The presence of a loveable ape was the biggest selling point for me, for christ's sake! But was he at the centre of the narrative? Not even a little bit. Clyde, an orangutan that Philo won in a fight a few years back and is inarguably the most interesting thing about him, is treated like an accessory for his tough guy image; a dog who can throw a punch. What little screen time he does get is spent going to great lengths anthropomorphizing him in the worst possible ways. There's a scene where Philo takes him to a zoo at night, breaks in and drops him into the ape enclosure so that he can, and I quote, "get laid". I wrote, more than once, 'please don't sexualize that ape' in my notes, hoping against hope that my suspicions were wrong. They were not. We also get to see an orangutan drink beer, but as per Philo's instructions, only on the weekends (thank god). Clyde also for reason unknown mercilessly terrorizes Philo's mother (Ruth Gordon), who lives on the same property in an adjacent house. Her entire storyline and presence in this film is unnecessary and a waste of time and I am personally offended on Ruth Gordon's behalf, but at the very least, it gives Clyde another activity. He also apparently understands pretty complex english sentences, as we see him react to verbal instruction with more accuracy than any ape has ever been able to display in the history of our attempts to establish communication with these animals. I wouldn't even be mad about that one if there was just more for Clyde to do. They spent 5 million dollars on this movie, and most of that went to the ape budget. I really wish we got to see more of that budget on screen.
A deviation from my original purpose in being on Clint Eastwood's IMDB brought me to
Every Which Way But Loose, which was ultimately a big waste of my time. I didn't even mention the biker gang that are nazis for some reason that pursue Philo the whole time, mostly because I started skipping their scenes about halfway through. This was a stylistically bland, conventionally sexist movie that promised orangutan and didn't really deliver. The title doesn't even make sense in connection to the narrative, but I guess key elements lacking context is the only constant in this thing. I'll leave you with a hilariously misguided quote from our man Clint that also has nothing to do with this movie: "I have a very strict gun control policy: if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it." I sincerely hope that you never end up in a room with Clint Eastwood and a gun, or Clint Eastwood and an orangutan for that matter.
P.S. Just a little more proof that Manis and his reputation should remain untarnished by this cruddy movie...
***
Hello all! She's back! I'll try to upload regularly, but I make no promises, because I'm the worst. If you made it to the end of this long-winded review, congratulations! Your prize is hopefully not making the mistake of sitting through this movie. Peace out nerds. See ya next week ;))
