“Why all this historical information?” you may be asking right now. “I thought this was an article about Cutter’s Way.” But a little context is helpful because the main character is a product of his times, the years prior to the film’s release. The novel on which it is based, Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg, was published in 1976. The Cutter of the title (of both the novel and the film) is one of the three main characters, Alex Cutter, and he abides by his own sense of justice and fairness, a personal code that is informed by his years of military service in Southeast Asia.
Cutter’s Way takes place over several days, which include the Old Spanish Days celebrations in Santa Barbara, California. In addition to the late 1970s/early 1980s time period, the film is strongly influenced by its setting, which is clear from the very beginning. The opening credits appear over one of the parades celebrating Old Spanish Days in Santa Barbara. The action in this opening sequence starts in slow motion, and the images are in black and white. The music on the soundtrack is almost atonal because it, too, has been slowed down and deliberately distorted to match the slow-motion action of the parade participants. As the participants advance toward the camera, color slowly fills in, and the camera begins to focus on one dancer in the parade. She is wearing a white dress with ruffles from her waist to the hem of her dress. The camera’s focus on her isn’t the only reason that she stands out: She is blonde and fair, in sharp contrast to the other participants around her. When she is closer to the camera, the ruffles on her dress “wipe” the screen to show a long shot of a Spanish-style mansion in daytime. The film then cuts to a shot of a street at night, with a neon sign reading El Encanto. The images in this opening sequence are disconcerting because they seem to be unconnected, but the connections are revealed as the story unfolds.
The film then cuts to a close-up of a man, Richard Bone, shaving. In spite of the care and attention he gives to this task, he still seems scruffy and a little unkempt when he is finished. Maybe this is just a late seventies/early eighties ascetic, but it is soon revealed that Bone is a man who is a bit down on his luck. He is having a liaison with a married woman in the El Encanto hotel, a woman who agrees to give him money when he mentions that he has to buy medicine for a sick friend. She doesn’t really believe his story about needing to visit this sick friend, but he does leave the El Encanto (identified by its neon sign, the same from the opening sequence) with her money.
(This article about Cutter’s Way contains spoilers.)
While Bone is outside waiting for his jalopy of a car, a green Healey convertible with a sputtering engine, it starts to rain. The car later breaks down on in a dark narrow alley, and Bone cannot get the Healey started again. While he is trying to turn over the engine, another car pulls up not too far behind him. A man gets out and dumps something in a trash can on the side of the alley. Richard Bone tries to flag him down for some help, but the driver nearly runs him down and takes off instead. When the rain turns to a deluge, Bone ditches his car and walks to a bar to meet his friend Alex Cutter.
Cutter is already drunk. He almost gets into a fight with three black men because of his unabashed use of racial slurs, but Richard Bone intervenes and mentions that Cutter fought in “the war.” The three men saunter off because they can understand that Cutter has troubles. Bone leaves the bar and goes to the Cutter house, where Mo Cutter, Alex’s wife, is also already drunk. Cutter comes home much later with the help of a friend, George Swanson. Although nothing happens between Richard and Mo before Alex arrives home, it is obvious that they share some history, and it’s possible that the three of them are living in an on-and-off-again ménage à trois.
The next day, when the trash is picked up in the same narrow alley where Bone abandoned his car, public works employees find a woman’s dead body stashed in a trash can. Soon after, police detectives show up at the Cutter home, where Bone is staying. It didn’t take them long to find Bone’s car and trace its owner. They arrest him on suspicion of murder and take him into custody. He arrives at the police station in handcuffs.
Detective Lieutenant R. Witcher interviews Bone, but Bone cannot identify the man that he saw in the alley and he insists that he had nothing to do with the murder. Detective Witcher tells him that the victim was seventeen years old, a cheerleader. Her trachea was crushed and her skull was fractured; it was a brutal rape and murder. Detective Witcher brings in the victim’s sister, Valerie Duran, to talk to Bone, but he cannot offer any more information. The police release Bone because they have no evidence to connect him to the victim or her body, just the unfortunate coincidence of his car sputtering to a stop in the same wet dark alley.
After his release, Richard Bone meets the Cutters at another Old Spanish Days parade, where they are part of the crowd of spectators enjoying the day. Cutter is loud, belligerent, already drunk. He can’t stop himself from making rude comments to complete strangers and pointing out to Richard Bone all the young female parade participants, much to his wife’s annoyance. He seems to be wearing down both his wife and his best friend, but they do not abandon him. Richard Bone turns his attention to the parade, and he sees the man from the alley riding a white horse in the parade. He points him out to Alex Cutter, who tells Bone that the man is J. J. Cord; that he owns an oil company, Cord Consolidated Oil; and that he is very wealthy.
In spite of its current reputation as a state leader in the attempt to address climate change, California was once a major oil producer in the 1970s and 1980s and still produces some oil today. The film includes a rather long sequence with Richard Bone and Valerie Duran out on Bone’s boat. She tries to seduce Bone, and even though her exact intentions remain a mystery, her attempt is the point of the sequence. During Valerie and Richard’s conversations on the boat, oil stations are visible in the distant background, seemingly out of place in an area of the water along the California coast that is used for boating and recreation.
Cutter is immediately suspicious of Cord, an older, rich white man, after Richard Bone’s identification during the parade. Cutter can easily see how young girls and teenagers could become the targets of older businessmen celebrating, perhaps by drinking alcohol and maybe taking drugs, too (both are alluded to in the film). Such a combination, after several days of parades and celebrations especially, can easily lead to trouble, including the physical and sexual abuse of minors and even murder. The fact that his friend can remember Cord and identify him is enough for Cutter to launch his own interrogation of Bone, but his questioning is based on exoneration of his friend, not on an assumption of guilt.
Valerie Duran, the murdered teenager’s sister, wants to pursue an investigation of her sister’s case. She doesn’t have much luck getting Bone to join her, but she is more successful getting Alex Cutter interested (in the investigation primarily). She devises a plan to “pretend-blackmail” J. J. Cord because she and Cutter are convinced that he is the murderer. They plan to send Cord a letter saying that they have a witness to his crime and demand payment for them to keep quiet. If Cord pays, then they will have proof that he is guilty.
Richard Bone wants no part of the plan because he doesn’t want any trouble. Whether Cord is guilty or not is irrelevant to him; he doesn’t want to invite attention and headache. Valerie wants to go ahead with the plan anyway, and Bone tells her, “You’ll end up in a leaky boat.” He calls Alex Cutter’s ideas a fantasy that can only spell trouble for him. “Your fantasy, my ass,” as he tells Cutter.
Alex Cutter wants justice for Valerie Duran’s sister. He uses his experience of the Vietnam War to justify his position for wanting to exact justice himself. Part of his argument to Richard Bone includes an example of what happens when people see pictures of civilians, for example, a woman with a child and they’re both face down in a ditch. People who see such images have three successive reactions: “I hate the United States of America.” The second time, they say, “There is no God.” By the third time, they are already numb and think of their own needs. Alex Cutter refuses to succumb to such apathy and inaction.
To get Alex off his back, Richard Bone finally agrees to join the blackmail plot. Valerie Duran writes the letter, even though it’s a letter from Bone, and Bone agrees to sign it—but on one condition: that Alex Cutter tell his wife Mo what they are planning to do. Perhaps he knows already that Mo will be the voice of reason, the one who will see through their plans and call them out. And that’s exactly what Mo does.
She accuses Alex, Valerie, and Richard of extortion. Cutter believes their plot is worth it for the greater good (the end justifies the means), for getting justice for a young murder victim. Mo thinks all of them are in the wrong, that they are trying to justify what they are doing. Once again, Alex Cutter’s war experiences inform the present, but this time, it’s Mo who brings it up. She tells Alex that this situation comes down to his missing leg, that it is still sending messages to his brain, only there isn’t anything there anymore. Alex Cutter’s reaction is to slap Mo across the face, and Richard Bone has to step between them to prevent Alex from hitting Mo again.
The film focuses just as much on the main characters and their relationships as it does on the young woman’s murder. Mo and Alex Cutter and Richard Bone argue about what to do next, but they unwittingly place themselves on a collision course with J. J. Cord, who seems to hold all the power and none of the responsibility for his actions. It is obvious that Cord and his wife feel entitled to their wealth and their way of life. Mrs. Cord sets bodyguards on Richard Bone when he and Alex Cutter crash one of their parties. Cutter gets away, but Bone is beaten. Whether Mrs. Cord knows about her husband’s connections to the rape and murder of a teenager is never made clear. J. J. Cord has no intention of standing idly by while Bone and Cutter lob accusations about him. Before Bone and Cutter crash his party, Mo Cutter died in a house fire, and her husband thinks the timing of this horrific disaster is no accident. He also believes that Richard Bone was the real target of the fire.
As I said, Alex Cutter is a disabled Vietnam veteran, and the film doesn’t shy away from that point. Cutter has obvious physical wounds: He lost an eye, an arm, and part of his leg in the war. His psychological wounds are fairly obvious, too. He is a heavy drinker and doesn’t seem to have a job or any interests, other than drinking, to occupy his time. He struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and with adjustment to civilian life eight years after the United States pulled out of Vietnam in January 1973. But he also has to contend with the general attitude toward veterans of the Vietnam War. The film portrays this very subtly in one particular sequence involving Alex in an altercation with his next-door neighbor.
Cutter comes home one night to find that his neighbor parked his Toyota in the street so that it blocks his driveway about halfway. Cutter backs up and rams his Buick into the Toyota hard enough to send it onto the neighbor’s front lawn. The neighbor comes outside enraged: His Toyota is now a crumpled heap on his front lawn. He confronts Alex with verbal abuse and threatens him physically and, once again, Richard Bone intervenes to calm the situation and help his friend. The neighbor decides to call the police, and a police cruiser arrives on the scene. An officer starts his questioning and notices that Alex’s license is expired. He hands a citation to Alex Cutter for a license violation, then tells Alex and his neighbor that they can work out the details with their insurance companies.
The neighbor accuses Cutter of being crazy, a menace to society, and he demands that the police officer do something about him. The offices says that he will turn in a report, but that’s not good enough for the neighbor. After proclaiming his status as a taxpayer, he calls after the cruiser as it drives off, ““Goddamned fascist pigs.” The neighbor’s verbal abuse and name calling directed toward officers and veterans was usually attributed to young people, in particular, those under the age of thirty, during the Vietnam War and after, but Cutter’s neighbor isn’t in that demographic.
Without any knowledge of the history between Cutter and his neighbor (the film doesn’t provide any backstory for Cutter’s neighbor), it’s impossible to know what drove them to this particular argument on this particular night. But it’s clear that the neighbor expected a lot more from an officer, who most likely did all that he could legally do. I’m guessing that the police officer fulfilled his duty: Without personal injury, he probably couldn’t do much more than file a report that included the stories from all parties involved.
Cutter’s interaction with his wife Mo and his friend Richard Bone throughout this sequence shows how much all three are really attached to one another, in spite of Alex Cutter’s irascible ways. And it shows how much they stick together in the confrontation with the neighbor. The sequence also shows how Alex Cutter creates sympathy with the police officer over their shared sense of duty, which the neighbor doesn’t appreciate at all. Alex Cutter’s sense of duty is what drives him, even if it has been changed over the years thanks to his war experiences.
The film focuses most on the three main characters and their relationships, and that made it easy to get caught up in their lives. They struggle with overwhelming problems, and that’s especially true of Alex Cutter. Cutter is rude and obnoxious to friends and strangers alike, but somehow, he, Mo, and Richard Bone are always sympathetic. In spite of his faults and his troubles, Cutter is loyal to his friend Richard Bone, and he is determined to see that his friend is not falsely accused of rape and murder. Richard Bone gets in trouble because he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and his friend Alex takes it upon himself to investigate the events leading up to Bone’s arrest and interrogation by the police.
I was completely absorbed by the story in Cutter’s Way, but some of the plot details stretched my suspension of disbelief at times. Here are a couple of examples:
◊ Richard Bone is a suspect, or at the very least a witness, in the rape and murder of a teenager, but the police do not keep tabs on him after his release and do not bring him in again for questioning. Except for Alex Cutter, no one, including the police, mentions the police interrogation of Bone or any follow-up questioning again.
◊ Cutter shoots a gun several times at a game arcade and no one calls the police.
In spite of my skepticism about these and other points in the narrative, I found myself getting right back into the story after any distraction.
Some contemporary critics of Cutter’s Way were not impressed with what they thought was a plot with too much conversation and too little detail. The film was first released using the same title, Cutter and Bone, as the novel on which it is based. But it was eventually given its new title and a bigger advertising budget, and ultimately got a much more positive reception, one I think it really deserves. Viewers are dropped into the lives of Alex and Mo Cutter and Richard Bone. It’s almost as if we are meeting them for the first time in real life, and it’s our job to get to know them. The unease and disruptions of life in the late seventies and early eighties may need to be taken as givens by viewers. Those years were very unsettled times, and the Cutters and Richard Bone reflect that unease in their day-to-day lives.
Cutter’s Way is very much a product of its time. The film re-creates an atmosphere of cynicism and apathy that pervades everything, the Old Spanish Days parades and the celebrations in Santa Barbara notwithstanding. The music on the soundtrack accentuates that atmosphere with unusual instruments playing throughout. The closing credits mention Eric Harry on the glass harmonica and Walter Repple on the zither. (I kept thinking of the zither in The Third Man [1949] and the theremin in Spellbound [1945].) Add to that the violent rape and murder of a teenager and a very unsettling story with troubled characters like the Cutters and Bone, and it’s easy to believe that all three of the main characters are doomed.
The images in the opening sequence of the film are significant because they introduce viewers to the main plot points and the most pivotal locations in the narrative. The blonde parade participant could very well be the murdered teenager. The Spanish-style mansion is the home of J. J. Cord, Alex Cutter’s suspect in the teenager’s rape and murder. The neon sign reading El Encanto identifies the hotel where Richard Bone has his rendezvous with a married woman. It is also the spot where the film begins and viewers meet Bone for the first time. The images that seem so unconnected at the start really are connected in very tragic ways.
I was completely absorbed by the story in Cutter’s Way. I had no idea what to expect, what was going to happen from one scene to the next, what to make of the film at first. But all of that turned out to be pluses rather than minuses. I always like a story, on film or in print, that keeps me guessing, and Cutter’s Way certainly is one of those stories. I enjoyed it so much that I saw it three times. The characters’ conversations provide the details; all you have to do is listen.
March 20, 1981, release date • Directed by Ivan Passer • Screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin • Based on the novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg • Music by Jack Nitzsche • Edited by Caroline Biggerstaff • Cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth
Jeff Bridges as Richard Bone • John Heard as Alex Cutter • Lisa Eichhorn as Maureen (Mo) Cutter • Ann Dusenberry as Valerie Duran • Stephen Elliott as J. J. Cord • Arthur Rosenberg as George Swanson • Francis X. McCarthy as Paul Savage • Nina van Pallandt as the woman in the hotel • Julia Duffy as the young girl • Caesar Cordova as the garbage truck driver • Billy Drago as the garbage man • Jonathan Terry as Detective Lieutenant R. Witcher • Ted White as guard number 1 • Patricia Donahue as Mrs. Cord
Distributed by United Artists • Produced by Gurian Entertainment
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