BY FRED BLOSSER
Corky
Curtiss (Robert Blake) aspires to be a champion stock-car racer. Fired from his job as a mechanic and
dirt-track competitor in small-town Bates, Texas, he abandons his wife Peggy Jo (Charlotte Rampling) and
their two small children, collects his pal Buddy (Chris Connelly) and heads
east in his 1966 Barracuda. His
destination: NASCAR’s Atlanta Motor Speedway, where he hopes to hook up with
the legendary Richard Petty. Corky met
the great Petty once, fleetingly, and he anticipates that the racing champ will
remember him and offer him a chance at the big time.
Messy
but interesting and relentlessly downbeat, “Corky†(1972) veers off into
unexpected turns as Blake’s troubled character pursues his chicken-fried
odyssey from Texas to Georgia. Ben
Johnson and Laurence Luckinbill appear prominently in the credits, but they
have hardly more than bit parts as rural racing impresarios whom Corky briefly
meets as he passes through Louisiana. A
scene with Pamela Payton-Wright as a fading and not-too-bright beauty queen,
and one with Paul Stevens as a sympathetic track manager in Atlanta, don’t go quite
as you might expect them to. Four NASCAR
stars (Cale Yarborough, Bobby and Donnie Allison, and Buddy Baker) appear in a
brief scene. Waiting hopefully to meet
Petty in the NASCAR offices at the Atlanta speedway, Corky spies the four
drivers through a soundproof glass wall in an adjacent room. As Corky waves, Yarborough glances at him,
then turns away, and the other three appear not to notice him at all. The racers’ body language suggests that
they’re preoccupied with planning for an upcoming meet, and not intentionally
dismissive, but one wonders whether, today, NASCAR would insist on a
fan-friendlier scene. Back home, Peggy
Jo goes to Corky’s old boss Randy (Patrick O’Neal) to see if her husband is due
any back pay that she desperately needs. Convention suggests that the older man will put the moves on the pretty,
vulnerable girl. Instead, he’s a decent
guy sympathetic to Peggy Jo’s plight. He
gives her a check for her husband’s back wages and additional “severance payâ€
without strings. The biggest surprise
among surprises is Rampling, who is believable and appealing in her atypical
role. She even manages a decent Texas
accent.
Reportedly,
“Corky†was one of the MGM productions in the early ‘70s that suffered at the
hands of imperious studio chief James Aubrey. One suspects that some of the film’s shortcomings, such as uneven pace
and ragged continuity, and maybe the quick disappearances of Johnson and
Luckinbill, were results of Aubrey’s post-production intrusion. Other lapses, like the miscasting of O’Neal
and Connelly, good actors in wrong roles, probably not. Robert Blake’s performance is all over the
place: abrasively pugnacious one moment, infantile and maudlin the next. Like the downward spiral of the story, which
finally drops Corky as low as he can go, without redemption, Blake’s rawness is
a reminder of the bygone cinema of the early ‘70s, where happy endings were
hardly ever the norm and volatile actors were expected and even encouraged to
get in the viewer’s face. Sometimes,
watching today’s sanitized and exhaustingly upbeat products from Hollywood, I
miss the old days.
“Corkyâ€
is a manufactured-on-demand DVD-R from Warner Archive Collection. The letterboxed, 2.35:1 image is
satisfactory. The film’s theatrical
trailer is the only extra. I wasn’t
familiar with “Corky†before putting the disc in the player, but apparently the
movie has a small but appreciative fan base of viewers who remember it from
long-ago drive-in and TV showings. They
should be particularly pleased that Warner Home Video has released the title.
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FRED BLOSSER IS THE AUTHOR OF "SAVAGE SCROLLS: VOLUME ONE: SCHOLARSHIP FROM THE HYBORIAN AGE". CLICK HERE TO ORDER ON AMAZON