Tag Archives: Relentless

Relentless (1948, directed by George Sherman)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Earlier today, I was searching for an old Johnny Mack Brown Western called Fronteir Agent.  I found a video on YouTube that claimed to be an upload of Frontier Agent but, when I started watching it, I discovered that the movie, while a western, was definitely not a Johnny Mack Brown programmer.  Instead, it was a movie called Relentless and it was about as different from Johnny Mack Brown’s cheery B-westerns as you could get.

Robert Young plays Nick Buckley, a drifter who is more comfortable riding the range than spending time with “civilzation.”  He rides into town on a rainy night, looking for shelter for him both him and his pregnant mare.  At the local saloon, two prospectors invite him to stay at their cabin for the night.  Another man, Tex (Barton MacLane), suggests that Nick and his mare should instead stay in Tex’s stables.  Tex isn’t just being altruistic.  He and Jim (Frank Fenton) murder the prospectors at their cabin and steal their map to a gold mine.  Tex then kills Jim and frames Nick for all three of the murders.  The entire town wants to either hang Nick or turn him in for the reward or force him to draw the map that they think he killed the prospectors for.  Only the owner of the traveling general store, Luella (Marguerite Chapman), believes Nick when he says that he’s been framed.

Dark and moody, Relentless is almost as much of a film noir as a western.  At first, Robert Young seems like a strange choice to play a drifter but he actually does a good job of showing how Nick is someone who has spent so much time on the frontier that he’s not really sure how to deal with civilization.  One reason that Tex is able to frame Nick is because Nick is a stranger.  He has no history and, at first, his main concerns seems to be taking care of his mare and her foal.  Nick was unlucky enough to ride into town at the wrong time and soon, he’s worth more dead than alive.  Nick’s quest to both clear his name and get revenge becomes an obsession (you might even call it relentless) and it takes him from the town to a barren desert.

One thing that sets this western apart from so many others is the relationship between Nick and Louella.  Louella is also a loner but, as a store owner, she’s accepted by the town in a way that Nick is not.  Louella and Nick come across as two mature people who have been hardened by life in the old west but who still haven’t surrendered their morals to greed like so many other characters in the movie.

Relentless is a superior western, featuring good acting and interesting characters.  I may never find Frontier Agent but I’m glad I found Relentless.

 

Dead On: Relentless II (1992, directed by Michael Schroeder)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Still struggling to recover from having to act opposite Judd Nelson in the previous Relentless film, Los Angeles homicide detective Sam Deitz (Leo Rossi) finds himself investigating another string of seemingly random murders.  This time, the killer is Gregor (Miles O’Keeffe), a master of disguise who hangs his victims, decorates the crime scene with Satanic graffiti, and takes a lot of ice baths.  Deitz is forced to team up with a condescending FBI agent named Kyle Valsone (Ray Sharkey), who has his own reasons for wanting to capture Gregor and who might not have the best interests of the case in mind.  As if having to deal with killer Russians and crooked FBI agents isn’t bad enough, Deitz is also having to deal with the collapse of his married to Meg Foster and the everyday irritations of being an intense New York cop in laid back Los Angeles.

Relentless II is a better than the first Relentless, mostly because Miles O’Keeffe is a better villain than Judd Nelson.  Whereas Nelson was too twitchy to be taken seriously in the first Relentless, O’Keeffe is cold as ice and believably dangerous.  He’s a worthy opponent for Rossi and Sharkey.  How much Keeffe was in this movie?  Just enough to make it work.

Whenever O’Keeffe isn’t doing his thing, the movie focuses on Deitz and Valsone.  To a certain extent, their relationship mirrors the relationship that Deitz had with Malloy in the first Relentless except, this time, the mentor turns out to be just as bad the killer.  Ray Sharkey was a good actor whose career nosedived because of his own addictions.  He was always at his best playing streetwise bad guys, like Sonny Steelgrave in Wiseguy.  He’s good as Valsone, giving a performance that indicates that, even if mainstream Hollywood wasn’t willing to take a chance of him, he could have carved out a direct-to-video career as a poor man’s Michael Madsen.  Unfortunately, Sharkey contracted HIV as a result of his heroin addiction and he died of AIDS just a year after the release of Relentless II.

Leo Rossi gives another good performance as Sam Deitz.  Rossi was usually cast as abusive boyfriends and low-level mobsters and it’s obvious that he enjoyed getting to play a hero for once.  Meg Foster may not get to do much as Deitz’s wife but her otherworldly eyes are always a welcome sight.

Relentless II was the high point of the Relentless films.  It made enough money to lead to a sequel.  Sam Deitz’s days of hunting serial killers were not over.

Relentless (1989, directed by William Lustig)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Buck Taylor (Judd Nelson) is the son of an LAPD cop who has never gotten over the bitterness he feels over being rejected by the force himself.  Determined to get revenge on a world that refuses to look beyond the dark circles under his eyes, Buck becomes a serial killer.  He picks his victims at random from the phone book.  Because his father was a cop and he studied to join the force, Buck knows all the tricks of the trade.

Pursuing Buck are two cops.  Bill Malloy (Robert Loggia) is a veteran detective who is supposed to be laid back though Robert Loggia was one of those actors who never seemed like he had been laid back a day in his life.  Malloy’s new partner is Sam Dietz (Leo Rossi).  Dietz has just transferred to Los Angeles from New York and he’s having a hard time adjusting.  Everyone is just too laid back.

When Buck starts to target the two cops who are investigating him, the case gets personal and relentless.

Relentless is a movie that I’ve been meaning to review for five years now.  In the past, I’ve always been deterred by the fact that reviewing Relentless would mean rewatching Relentless.  But, having just spent two weeks watching all of the Witchcraft films, I now feel like I can handle anything.  Relentless is a movie that I always remember as being better than it actually is.  The murders are creepy but Judd Nelson gives such a one-note performance as the killer that it’s impossible to believe that he could have gotten away with them.  As played by Nelson, Buck Taylor is such an obvious serial killer that I’m surprised that he wasn’t already in jail, having been accused of every single unsolved murder on the books.  There’s nothing compelling about this killer and films like this pretty much live and … ahem … die based on the quality of their villain.

Why do I always remember Relentless as being better than it is?  Most of the credit for that probably goes to Leo Rossi, an underappreciated character actor who gives such a good performance as Sam Dietz that he makes the entire movie better.  Rossi even got a brief franchise out of his performance in Relentless, as Dietz returned for three sequels.  Robert Loggia is also good as Malloy and it’s unfortunate that the movie doesn’t do as much with the character as it could have.

Rossi and Loggia aside, Relentless doesn’t live up to its potential.  But it was still popular enough to launch a direct-to-video franchise.  Tomorrow: Relentless 2.