Buck buck b’kaw, it’s Burl, here to review a movie at which many would cry fowl! Ha ha, you know, old Burl is an animal lover, so I find it hard to get behind a movie that depicts – indeed, has caused – harm to any creature! I actually think Cannibal Holocaust is a pretty effective movie, but that tortoise-killing scene really sours it for me! (To be honest, some of the other gnarly stuff in there does too!) I’ve praised many an old Western film, but when they start tripping horses I spend the rest of the movie thinking about how mean that is! And then comes along a movie whose story, theme, very essence, and even title, involves heavy doses of terrible animal cruelty: Cockfighter!
What to make of it? I’d seen it before but watched it again the other day, because someone I know is writing a book about the movie! Ha ha, I’m raring to read it! And I’ll tell you what, I also met the director of this picture, Monte Hellman, when I stayed at his house in the Hollywood Hills, where he hosted an Air B‘n’B! He was a nice fellow and we chatted quite a bit about movies and such! The third outside factor which might somehow affect how I think about this movie is that once, for moviemaking reasons too complicated to get into, I had to keep a rooster overnight in my apartment! I built a big cage for the thing, put it in my living room, and then of course the bird went off at four-thirty in the morning, cock-a-doodle-dooing away and waking up all the people in my building; and only playing the song “Bali H’ai” from South Pacific could get it to shut up! Ha ha, the incident didn’t endear me to roosters, I’ll say that!
So: Cockfighter! It’s the story of Frank Mansfield, played by Warren Oates from Blue Thunder and Race with the Devil, a down-South fighting-cock trainer who has taken a vow of silence after letting his own foolish words cause him to lose out on a chance to be Cockfighter of the Year! Only once he wins that medal does he plan to speak again, and so far, we gather, it’s been a couple of years since he first clammed up! (Ha ha, we get to witness his pre-vow chattiness in a flashback, and he’s so obnoxious that I was quite happy to have him spend most of the movie with zipped lips!)
Frank travels around with his birds and a gal named Dody, who has only ever heard Frank talk in his sleep, when he blusters and yells and threatens to kick people across the room! Dody is one of a very few performances from Laurie Bird, who was also in Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop and later in Annie Hall, and that’s it! Frank loses yet another bet to his frenemy Jack Burke, played by the great Harry Dean Stanton from Christine and Repo Man, and Jack walks away with Frank’s money, car, camper trailer, and girlfriend! This is where we get a sense of how much Frank values human relationships, in particular with women, which is to say not very much! We also see how he treats his brother (played unexpectedly by matinee idol Troy Donahue, known from Grandview U.S.A. and Deadly Prey) and sister-in-law: Frank arrives at the family home, stays the night, and the next day steals the house (which technically he owns) right out from under them and has it shipped off down the road on a truck!
But Frank does have at least one true pal in Omar, essayed by Richard B. Shull from Klute and Spring Break! Ha ha, Omar is a mighty appealing character, or at least as appealing as someone who engages in a pointless blood sport can be! Frank hangs out with Omar and with Buford, another affable fellow, here played by James Earl Jones’s dad Robert Earl Jones, whom we may recall from Trading Places! Much of the middle act of the picture involves Frank hanging out with these two, or episodes in which he encounters such characters as a gangly overall-clad goofbuster played by Ed Begley Jr. from Get Crazy, or Steve Railsback from Lifeforce, playing a cocky cockfighter with a loosey-goosey pointin’ finger who likes to give his birds a little bit of digital persuasion!
I’ve not talked much about the cockfights themselves, which are frequent and often bloody! They’re faked to an extent – the sharp spurs are mostly not actually made of metal – but there’s only so much you can fake these things really, and there are times when the cocks are clearly killing each other! It’s pretty grotesque, but also a powerful dramatic device! Through the course of the picture, in spite of or maybe because of Frank’s silence, we move more than we may like into his point of view and the fights become less brutal and alien; but when the object of his silent amours, his fiancée Mary Elizabeth, played by pretty redheaded Patricia Pearcy from Squirm, finally witnesses a cockfight, we see the bloody spectacle from her perspective and are suddenly repulsed anew by it, along with her!
The picture is exacting in its detail and almost never strikes a false note! It’s clear the cock pits we see are real cock pits, the spectators are real spectators, and of course the roosters are real roosters, fighting and clawing and beaking each other bloody! The cast is just about perfect: ha ha, what a gallery of faces, and in addition to those already named we get folks like Warren Finnerty from The Laughing Policeman, Tom Spratley from Deadly Friend, and even Kermit Echols from Grizzly! But it remains that Mansfield, as ingratiating as he can sometimes be in his silence – slapping his knee in response to a joke, or darting out his hand for a shake to seal the deal or to indicate agreement – and as marvelous as Oates’s performance is, is ultimately a damaged and inhumane guy; and that the sport itself, in spite of occasional bursts of first-person narration trying to explain Frank’s love of it, is indefensible! It’s a wonder that this movie exists, and, cruelty aside (if that’s possible), it’s one of the most perfectly-crafted things Roger Corman, or the 1970s for that matter, ever produced! And that’s saying something on both counts, ha ha! I give Cockfighter three and a half busted beaks!
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