Talk about embarrassing! When Lisa told me that today was Joe Don Baker’s birthday, I decided that I would review Speedtrap, as 1977 car theft movie that Lisa and I watched last week. But, when I took a look at the imdb to double check the name of the character that Baker played in Speedtrap, I discovered that I had already reviewed it!
Instead of talking about Speedtrap a second time, I’m going to recommend one of Joe Don Baker’s early films. In Welcome Home, Soldier Boys, Baker stars as Danny, the leader of a group of Green Berets who have just returned from Vietnam and can no longer find a place in society. Danny, Kid (Alan Vint), Shooter (Paul Koslo), and Fatback (Elliott Street) go on a cross-country road trip. After they kill a prostitute (Jennifer Billingsley) who demanded more money than they were willing to pay, they visit many sites from their youth. They go to a high school basketball team. They spend some time in a sleazy motel. (Geoffrey Lewis plays the desk clerk.) They get into a fight with a mechanic (Timothy Scott) over the price of some auto repairs. After being cheated by one too many people and realizing that no one cares about the sacrifices that they made for their country, they put on their uniforms and violently take over a small town, leading the National Guard to show up to take them all out.
Welcome Home, Soldier Boys is a pretty ham-fisted anti-war allegory and the plot sometimes meanders too much for its own good. With its road trip violence, its a dry run for director Richard Compton’s far more cohesive Macon County Line. The movie still packs a punch, due to the efforts of the cast and the violent ending. The movie is full of familiar characters actors, who are all convincing in their roles but it really is dominated by Joe Don Baker’s hulking intensity. Danny is the dark side of the amiable country boys that Joe Don Baker would play in so many other movies. Danny is angry but, as a stranger in a strange land, he’s sometimes sympathetic. Ultimately, Danny wants the respect that was given to the returning soldiers of the previous generation. Instead, he comes back to country that doesn’t want much to do with him or his friends. Returning from serving overseas and still trying to deal with the things that he saw in overseas, Danny feels lost in and rejected by his home country. It’s one of Baker’s best performances.
In the backwoods of Hicksville, USA, two families are feuding. Laban Feather (Rod Steiger, bellowing even more than usual) and Pap Gutshall (Robert Ryan) were once friends but now they are committed rivals. They claim that the fight started when Pap bought land that once belonged to Laban but it actually goes back farther than that. Laban and Pap both have a handful of children, all of whom have names like Thrush and Zeb and Ludie and who are all as obsessed with the feud as their parents. When the Gutshall boys decide to pull a prank on the Feather boys, it leads to the Feathers kidnapping the innocent Roonie (Season Hubley) from a bus stop. They believe that Roonie is Lolly Madonna, the fictional fiancée of Ludie Gutshall (Kiel Martin). Zack Feather (Jeff Bridges), who comes the closest of any Feather to actually having common sense, is ordered to watch her while the two families prepare for all-out war. Zack and Roonie fall in love, though they do not know that another Feather brother has also fallen in love with Gutshall daughter. It all leads to death, destruction, and freeze frames.
Through the Shattered Lens 