Every Which Way But Loose (1978, James Fargo)

One-punch man.

Originally published 6/17/22 on Substack

This is the second winner of April’s movie poll, after Empire of the Ants. Inevitably, there are spoilers here, including the ending. Read with care. Thanks!

What is it? Every Which Way But Loose, directed by James Fargo, written by Jeremy Joe Kronsberg, and starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, Beverly D’Angelo, Ruth Gordon, Gregory Walcott, and introducing Manis as Clyde.

First viewing? Yes, although I may have seen it (or at least some of it) in the theater or on cable when I was a kid. 

What’s it about? Philo (Eastwood) is a truck driver and part-time bare knuckle boxer in Los Angeles who lives with his mother (Gordon) and brother (Lewis). After meeting country singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor (Locke), he falls head over heels in love and goes looking for her when she leaves for Colorado. Meanwhile, Philo has made enemies of a local biker gang and a pair of LAPD cops. 

What are your thoughts about it? Clint Eastwood is an Against the ’70s icon. Big surprise, I’m sure. Yes, his career was well under way by the end of the ’60s, and he’s been a prominent cinematic presence ever since. But the ’70s contain 3/5ths of the Dirty Harry series, Damnation Decade selection The Gauntlet, Eastwood’s directorial debut Play Misty for Me, cult favorites Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Eiger Sanction, and, counting today’s selection, eight other films. I don’t know if you could say Eastwood owned the ’70s, but with sixteen movies in ten years, he was certainly a majority shareholder. Eastwood will appear in this column again.

I mean, I certainly hope so at least, because it would be a shame if this movie represented Eastwood’s ’70s output. Every Which Way But Loose was, at the time, Eastwood’s biggest hit, and the #2 movie of 1978. I don’t think it was his first foray into comedy as a lead (I haven’t seen Paint Your Wagon, which I assume was the first), but it seems to be the first to build a comedy around his gruff, ultra-masculine, tight-lipped, no-nonsense persona.

Probably the exact image you imagined when you read “bare knuckle boxer.”

That’s a great concept! The actual result, though, leaves a lot to be desired. Now, based on my Letterboxd feed (which, admittedly, is not representative), I’m in the minority on this. And I get it! It’s a hang-out movie. It’s full of what the kids call “vibes.” Nothing much happens, and that’s the appeal. If you want to see Clint Eastwood enjoy the company of Geoffrey Lewis (owner of the saddest eyes in cinema, R.I.P.) and an orangutan, this is the movie for you! If you want to see Sondra Locke (one of the most luminous and delicate presences in cinema, R.I.P.) acting convicingly tough and do a pretty good impersonation of a country music singer, this is the movie for you! If you want to see Eastwood and Locke steam up the screen so much you gotta wipe it down, this is the movie for you! (There’s a whole plot in an episode of Friends built around the idea that once two actors are doing it, their onscreen chemistry fades. This movie disproves that.) If you wanted to see what working class Los Angeles looked like in 1978, this movie is for you! If you wanted to see Beverly D’Angelo five years before becoming one of the hottest movie moms ever, this is the movie for you! In a cinematic landscape where every screenplay has been measured, diagrammed, plotted out, test marketed, formulated, and algorithmed, it’s refreshing to see a movie from before all that, a movie that barely seems to know where it’s going at any particular moment. It’s a movie of defiantly low stakes.

Ah, Geoffrey Lewis, one of my favorite character actors. I’m glad he got to play a regular guy who courts a pretty woman and does right by her — you know, basically wins for once. (Although the initial meet-cute is kinda weird.)

Okay, a brief, possibly annoying, detour. I just used the phrase “low stakes,” a phrase you’ve probably heard, along with its companion, “high stakes.” (No one ever talks about medium stakes.) I shouldn’t have used it. I don’t think anyone should use it. It’s a bad phrase that miscommunicates what stakes are about. Stakes are often phrased as objective circumstances — “saving the Earth from destruction” is high stakes, and “character searching for a long lost photo of their mother” is low stakes. This is incorrect. Stakes are defined by how the relevant character feels about the goal at hand, and in pretty much any story, they care a lot. (If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be much of a story.) Therefore, all stakes are the same. The only difference is scope, and I think that’s a difference without distinction. The stakes here are that Eastwood’s Philo, a guy who clearly lives is life one quarter mile at a time, has, to his surprise, fallen hard for a woman, and he sets off to find her and be with her when she takes off to Colorado.

Ah, Beverly D’Angelo. It’s kind of a nothing role, but D’Angelo is so D’Angelriffic that she becomes a memorable part of the group dynamic.

However, this story doesn’t work, and it’s not because of the stakes. If stakes are just another way of stating the character’s goal, then, in order to have conflict, you have to have obstacles, opposition, antagonists. This is where Every Which Way But Loose falters. The main antagonists here are the Nazi biker gang and the two LAPD cops. Philo’s a bare knuckle boxer, and also he’s Clint Eastwood, so we expect him to bust some heads, and bust heads he does. I can’t think of anyone I’d like to see Eastwood beat the shit out of more than Nazis and cops. But ultimately they’re weak antagonists, quite literally, for two reasons. First, they have no connection to the Sondra Locke portion of the plot. They aren’t trying to stop Philo because they want her for themselves, nor did she hire them to get in Philo’s way, or anything like that. They kind of float in and out of the narrative, never feeling important, more like an unwanted intrusion. (Admittedly, this does contribute to the hang-out vibe.)

It’s not great, but it’s fine, whatever. The bigger problem is that antagonists and obstacles are a function of a sceenplay’s structure, and here, they are not load-bearing. At no point do either the gang or the cops cause Philo any trouble, either externally or internally. After the third time Philo cleans someone’s clock without any issue at all, the question creeps in: what is the point of this? Every fight is the same, it never advances or changes the story in any way, and it’s tiresome. This is true even of the big climactic fight with the gang, where they ambush him in a picturesque Colorado town. Even there, it only ends because the gang runs away when they see Lewis’s Orville destroying their bikes. (Don’t get me started on the cops’ “tactics” in their misbegotten climactic scene.) All of this could be acceptable if they were funny, but there’s not a laugh to be had. All of this could be acceptable if it was doled out in small portions, but they take up so much of the running time. In fact, the bikers get an entire fight sequence to themselves, where they fight (and lose to!) a bunch of nobodies at a diner.

Hey look! It’s longtime Hollywood bit player Hank Worden, best known to people like me as the Waiter from TWIN PEAKS, playing a role that’s not unlike the one Harry Dean Stanton played in TWIN PEAKS.

There’s a word for all this: padding. But that just raises another question: why? Let’s go back to the stakes. Philo has fallen in love with Lynn Halsey-Taylor, and tries to find her when she takes off to Colorado. He finds her, but then she disappears again. He locates her one final time and confronts her. Then comes the big gaspable, clutch-your-pearls revelation: she never liked him at all! She was just using him for sex! Then ghosting him! You know, that thing guys do! 

That the whole story hinges on this revelation is risible, so it’s a testament to just how good Eastwood and Locke are that it registers as good drama. And it would probably less risible if there was some follow through. Unfortunately, screenwriter Jeremy Joe Kronsberg has nothing past this revelation. No way forward, no fallout, no uncomfortable pieces to pick up¹ Hence, the padding. Once Philo confronts her, that’s it, and there’s only so much narrative dancing that can be contrived to keep him from doing so.

My personal style guide insists that every photo within the “movie evaluation” part of the text has a caption. I got nothin’ here, except Locke is great in this scene and I like this screen grab.

It’s frustrating, because this scene and the last one are the strongest². It’s clear, because Locke is a terrific actress, that Lynn realizes in that moment what she could have had and what she’s lost in Philo. And Eastwood conveys everything with the slightest relaxation of his face and the modest widening of his eyes. And there is some effect of this revelation on the next scene, where Philo catches up with legendary bare knuckle fighter Tank Murdock. Philo can’t do anything about the emotional hurt and humiliation he’s just been through, but he can spare another the same. If I don’t like this movie that much, but reserve some affection for it, it’s because these two scenes manage to pay the dividends promised.

How many stars out of five? Two. Trust me, I wanted to like it more. 

Where can I stream it? Every Which Way But Loose, as of this writing³, isn’t available for free. You can rent it from Apple, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu - Fandango, Microsoft Store, Redbox, DirecTV, AMC Theatres On Demand and Spectrum On Demand, and buy it from Apple, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu - Fandango, Microsoft Store, Redbox, DirecTV, and AMC Theatres On Demand.

What can we take from it? You may have expected to see Clyde written up as a creature. That was certainly an option, but if we look at the film, we can see that Clyde isn’t really his own character⁴. Rather, dramatically speaking, Clyde is an extension of Philo. As it is there, as it should be here. So, here is a new Focus, offering a character an orangutan friend who goes on adventures with them. This concept deserves a more bespoke writeup, and I’ve earmarked it for future work. For now, however, I’ve taken the preexisitng Focus, Keeps a Magic Ally (a Focus intended to give a character a genie-type friend), and reskinned it, making some rule adjustments along the way. Enjoy!

HAS AN ORANGUTAN BUDDY

Tier 1: Orangutan Buddy

Tier 2: Opposable Thumbs

Tier 2: It’s Where I Keep My Stuff

Tier 3: Orangutan Cheering Section or Responsibility

Tier 4: Bored Ape

Tier 5: Improved Orangutan Cheering Section

Tier 6: Finally Someone Let Me Out of My Cage or Workingman’s Luck

Orangutan Buddy

You have an orangutan as a friend and ally. Give the orangutan a name; the orangutan is a level 3 creature. The orangutan has its own personality; the player and the GM should come to an agreement as to the orangutan’s temperament. Normally, the orangutan remains in a specific area (a cage, the back of a truck, a shack in the backyard). This area is the orangutan’s designated home. You may use an action to call for the orangutan, who then leaves its home and appears at your side, if physically feasible. As an action, you can designate a new area as the orangutan’s home, in order to facilitate travel or other reasons.

Every time the orangutan is summoned from its home, it remains at your side for up to one hour. During that period, it accompanies you and follows your instructions. The orangutan must remain an immediate distance from you; if it moves farther away, it must return to its home as quickly as possible, and cannot be summoned until after your next ten-hour recovery roll. The orangutan cannot attack creatures, but it can use its action to serve as an asset for any one attack you make on your turn. Otherwise, it can take actions on its own, that you roll for.

The orangutan does not have a health score, and cannot be targeted, attacked, or harmed. This Focus is designed for comedic or lightly dramatic games or campaigns; it is not designed for darker and/or more violent scenarios. Action to initiate.

Opposable Thumbs and Toes (3 Intellect points)

When you summon your orangutan from your Orangutan Buddy ability, it can stay at your side until the end of your next ten-hour recovery roll, instead of a just an hour. Furthermore, it can move up to 300 feet from you before needing to return to its home. Finally, if you give your orangutan permission, it can exit and enter its home on its own initiative. Enaber.

It’s Where I Keep My Stuff

The orangutan from your Orangutan Buddy ability can store items for you inside its home, including extra sets of clothing, tools, food, beer, etc. Regardless of the actual size of its home, the home has, in effect, a space the size of a 10-foot square area to hold items. Enabler.

Orangutan Cheering Section

At your request, the orangutan from your Orangutan Buddy ability can use its action to do one of the following actions. After an hour has passed, the orangutan must retreat to its home to rest for one hour. Action to initiate.

• Get ’im! For the next several minutes, if you attack a target, you inflict 2 additonal points of damage.

• Hold the Line. You gain +1 to Armor for one hour.

• “Oh, Look! An Orangutan!” The presence of your orangutan convinces a sentient creature to regard you positively, as they would a potential friend. Action.

• Moral Support. You add 3 points to any stat Pool. If you are not damaged, you add the points to your chosen Pool’s maximum. They remain until you spend them, you lose them to damage, or an hour passes.

Responsibility (3+ Intellect points)⁵

Having an orangutan as a friend and ally, and being responsible for their care, has given you the mental strength to power through difficult mental and emotional circumstances. When your mind would be negatively affected by an effect of up to level 4, whether something overt as a psychic command or illness or something as subtle as fear or even boredom, your sense of responsibility neutralizes the effect for up to a minute, or, if you’re actively being attacked, until the next attack. For each level of Effort applied, you can increase the level of the effect you can neutralize by 1. Enabler. 

Bored Ape (5 Intellect points)

When you summon your orangutan from your Orangutan Buddy ability, is it now a level 4 creature. Also, the orangutan gains an ability to distract people. When use, it renders all sentient beings, level 4 or lower, within short range, unable to take actions for one minute. Hostile beings (guards chasing after the characters, for example) are only lose their turn, then can resume taking actions after that. After the orangutan uses this ability, it must retreat to its home to rest for three hours. Enabler.

Improved Orangutan Cheering Section

At your request, the orangutan from your Orangutan Buddy ability can use its action to do one of the following actions. After an hour has passed, the orangutan must retreat to its home to rest for one hour. Action to initiate.

• Get ’im Again! For the next several minutes, if you attack a target, you inflict 5 additonal points of damage.

• Keep Holding the Line. You gain +3 to Armor for one hour.

• “Lying.” Whenever you attempt to discern a falsehood during the next hour, the task is eased by two steps, as long as your orangutan is there to witness the possible falsehood.

• Moral-er Support. You add 6 points to any stat Pool. If you are not damaged, you add the points to your chosen Pool’s maximum. They remain until you spend them, you lose them to damage, or an hour passes.

Finally Someone Let Me Out of My Cage (7 Intellect points)

When you use this ability to summon your orangutan from your Orangutan Buddy ability, is it now a level 7 creature. It can only stay with you outside its home for three minutes, after which it must return to its home and rest for three days before you can summon it again.

The orangutan can use the same distraction ability from Bored Ape; however it may also pelt anyone within short range with small projectiles: beer cans, gravel, kitchen items, garbage, or, uh, self-generated material. These items do 7 points of damage to all targets designated by you, or the orangutan, if you wish. This continues every round for thirty rounds (three minutes) or until ended by you. Remember, the orangutan cannot be targeted, attacked, or harmed. Once ended, the orangutan must return to its home.

Workingman’s Luck

When you use Workingman’s Luck, roll a d6. On any even result, the task you’re attempting is eased by two steps. On a roll of 1, the task is hindered. Enabler.