philosopherjack Viewed today, Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way seems even more clearly an expression of America's divisions and fractures: sleek images of privilege clash with outbursts of paranoia, dark fantasy and instability - the film's evasive mastery lies in the frequent difficulty of determining the dividing lines. Jeff Bridges' Richard Bone witnesses the late-night dumping of a murdered woman, and thinks the murderer may be a wealthy oil mogul; his friend Alex Cutter hatches a plan to tease out a confession by threatening blackmail; Cutter's wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn) keeps much of her thoughts and her sadness to herself behind a fixed but fragile smile. John Heard's Cutter is a singular creation - an eye, arm and leg lost in Vietnam, he seems initially like a wildly provocative, undisciplined drunk, but it becomes clear that there's some methodical artifice to this madness, even if the only rational outcome of it is self-obliteration. The film hints at past entanglements, crimes and lost possibilities, suggesting that the outrage of Vietnam was only the most visible manifestation of the mess at home. And the outstanding ending delivers an emblematic charging toward justice on a white horse, foretold early in the film, but accompanied by pervasive confusion of a precisely plotted kind only achievable through immaculate creative clarity. When the mogul is finally directly confronted, there's a direct line from his chilling response - "What if I did?" - to (say) assertions about one's ability to stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and kill someone without losing voters; the stage is larger, but the challenge to stability and morality (or what's still intact of both) is the same. The main difference, beyond even what the film foresaw, is that our own rampaging mogul would hijack so much of Cutter's self-justifying paranoia, without any of its moral purpose.

Mr-Fusion The brilliance of "Cutter's Way" is that it keeps you thinking about the witnessed crime in the film's opening, but it's really about the three main characters; individuals so adrift and hurting that you just hope for some kind of catharsis for these people. John Heard and Lisa Eichhorn really shine because of this, although Jeff Bridges is no lightweight. This is a crime/character drama that I couldn't peel away from. You get the unshakable feeling that everything about the picture Heard's character has painted for us is wrong, and that we're heading for a very tragic ending. But it speaks to the narrative's strength that I had to find out, one way or the other. And it is most certainly a sad end (ambiguities and all), which continues to haunt after the credits finished rolling. Outstanding movie.8.5/10

SnoopyStyle Alex Cutter (John Heard) is a drunken disabled war veteran. His wife Mo (Lisa Eichorn) is also a drunken mess. Their best friend Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) is a witness to a murder, and he thinks that the killer is this powerful oil tycoon JJ Cord (Stephen Elliott). Cutter refuses to let it go, and together with the victim's sister Valerie Duran (Ann Dusenberry) harasses Bone to get JJ.The main drawback is that their plan was never going to work. If they really thought about it, they would see it as a fool's errand. The plan actually insulates JJ from any testimony from Bone. The plan actually helps JJ.However we know Cutter is a drunk bastard. So I'm willing to believe that he would come up with a poorly constructed plan. It's the acting that is so superior in this. John Heard really goes all out, and Jeff Bridges' calmness makes them the perfect duo. I just love how crazy John Heard gets. He really shines.

dr_alexander_reynolds I admit I am also very puzzled by the huge predominance of positive reviews given to this movie on this site. The only possible explanation I can see for this is a sort of "virtue by association", since certain features of the film (the presence of actors like Bridges, Heard and Eichhorn; the setting in a seedy milieu with the Vietnam War and Watergate lurking vaguely but potently in the spiritual background) do draw it, superficially, into proximity with masterpieces of 70s cinema like certain films by Bob Rafelson or Arthur Penn. But the proximity is indeed superficial and misleading. "Cutters Way" displays certain stylistic and thematic points in common with the profound, structured, satisfying masterpieces of 70s cinema - but the sad fact is that it is itself neither profound, nor structured, nor - for just these reasons - in the least bit satisfying as a film. We are - or should be - all aware of the dangers of praising "ambiguity" as a meritorious quality in a work of art. I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced by the implied contention - and in most of the reviews here this contention is indeed only IMPLIED, not frankly asserted and argued for - that Passer somehow made a conscious artistic decision to break with conventional structures of plot and narrative here. The fact that we are left, in the end, radically uncertain whether the man Bridges and Heard are pursuing - and whom Bridges presumably actually kills - committed the crime or not cannot seriously be presented as a dramaturgical or moral strength of the film. The vague piece of empty existentialist piety that some of the reviewers come out with - "the film is not about the need to do any particular thing but rather the need to TAKE ACTION per se" - is one of the most repellently ridiculous things I have ever heard. Does this film seriously propose to us that, since society is vaguely rotten and the true "culprits" of this rotten-ness cannot be reached or even clearly identified, we are morally required to break into the houses of random rich people, who look suspiciously content and well-situated, and murder them? I think we do the director a favour if we choose to classify the utter inconclusiveness of the final scenes as an example of the same narrative confusion and sloppiness as, say, the unexplained vanishing, two-thirds of the way through the movie, of an apparently central character: the victim's sister. I honestly don't see how anyone can fail to get the impression that - far from conveying some deep "symbolic meaning" - the final sequences of the movie were just cobbled together in an attempt to close with as many dramatic and emotional images as possible. Certainly, any psychological coherence that the Cutter character might at some point have had is jettisoned in the last five minutes. After being portrayed for an hour and a half as being doggedly and single-mindedly determined to carefully coordinate the exposure of the Cobb character as a murderer, Cutter's "plan" to do so turns out in the end to consist in nothing more than to go hobbling wildly around the man's house, run away from his bodyguards, jump on a horse he finds in his stables, and then fling himself randomly through some French windows, promptly breaking his own neck. I have no idea whether this scene was present in the original novel, but I must honestly say that this risible spectacle of the hero careening wildly through the garden party - emotionally "beefed up" by some cheap and predictable "subjective camera" shots intended to positively FORCE the viewer to identify with Cutter in a way that his actions themselves make it pretty much impossible to do - seems to me a textbook example of directorial desperation and the frantic attempt to give direction and conclusion, by the sheer illusory spectacle of velocity, to a film that really wasn't going anywhere at all. Sorry, but to even vaguely imply that a messy, confusedly pretentious movie like this can be mentioned in the same breath with 70s classics like "The King of Marvin Gardens" or "Night Moves" is to do grave disservice to the memory of 1970s US cinema.