This is a review of an obscure 1974 romantic comedy, or at least I’m assuming that’s what’s supposed to be, starring Sissy Spacek and a bunch of other people who don’t matter as much. The movie was filmed in 1972, when our little Texan from Quitman was a mere twenty-two year old. The story seems mostly set near Albuquerque, a few decades before the rise of Walter White’s empire.

The whole movie is up on YouTube for some reason, and that’s where I watched it. Shown below.

Now, why did I bother watching this film? Because I also picked up this strawberry-blonde hitchhiker while watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and the same as the hapless protagonist of this movie, now I can’t get that little Texan out of my mind. As far as I’m concerned, Sissy Spacek in the 70s was the most precious flower. I usually don’t get interested in people, other than a previous burning obsession with Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012. So I went to the trouble of immersing myself in a movie from fifty fucking years ago because there’s a limited amount of material that captured the passage of 70s Sissy Spacek through this world before entropy set in, and god damn it, I’m going to get through all of it.

Sissy plays a hippie hitchhiker. Being that gorgeous and young, it’s a surprise she hadn’t been killed yet; plenty of serial killers must have been roaming around in the 70s. Now, I don’t like hippies, and I think that giving people like that any power will ruin a society, but Sissy remains her delightful, charming, vulnerable self. Like the protagonist, I was inclined to give her a pass on whatever she said about coffee giving one wrinkles, or about whipped cream being synthetic, as long as I could see her smile. So I can’t blame the protagonist that much for pussyfooting around Sissy’s character’s whimsical nonsense that the world hadn’t yet beaten out of her.

That said, I experienced an arc of my own with the male protagonist. He started out as a sensitive, good man who, after his divorce, may have deserved the good luck of picking up Sissy. He was respectful and kind to her. However, shortly after the movie introduced a drunken friend of his, the whole movie, as well as my respect for the male protagonist, collapsed. And it happened fairly early.

This is a spoiler, but whatever: the same way the male protagonist’s cowardice led him to pussyfoot around Sissy’s nonsense, he also decided to speak about Sissy, for whom the guy had already fallen hard, as just some random “sure thing,” a “hot number” he picked up on the road, in order to placate his friend. Sissy heard him talk about her as though she were nothing more than an easy lay, and naturally her respect for this man shattered completely.

Now, we know that the male protagonist didn’t really mean it. But it doesn’t matter. The guy is in his late forties as far as I can tell, and he not only decided to talk that way about someone he clearly had fallen for, but also proceeded to blame his friend as if that drunkard had pried the words out of him. From then on, I was on the wounded hippie’s side: she should have taken the next bus to Colorado or wherever the fuck she was going and forgotten this whole episode even happened. The male protagonist showed a clear incapacity to connect with her emotionally, and even raised his voice when she was there hurting. I could see how he had ended up divorced.

I didn’t get the impression this was part of his character arc, as some flaw that he was supposed to fix; I suspect that the screenwriter was treating it as “Well, he’s a man. That’s relatable, isn’t it? She should just get over it.” That impression was enhanced later by the casual way the screenwriter treated spousal abuse; the male protagonist, drunk at that point, seemingly found it hilarious.

We never learned all that much about Sissy’s character as a person other than that she was a songwriter, wrote poems, was a hippie, and thought that some of her random delusions were facts. But Sissy sold all of it with her charm, beauty, and peculiar mannerisms: her casual and disarming sincerity, never concealing either her enthusiasm or hurt, the way she looks into other people’s faces as if taking it all in openly, those precious smiles of hers. And she also plays the guitar briefly; Sissy’s initial goal was to become a songwriter.

In an introduction for the 50th anniversary of the movie, the fifty-years-older male actor said that the movie had been financed because someone introduced Sissy Spacek to the money guy, who proceeded to fall in love with her, and gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce the movie. I assume that the 70s was a sequence of random men casually encountering Sissy Spacek and falling madly in love with her. Sissy’s eventual husband, the art director for Badlands, saw her first coming down some stairs, all strawberry-blonde, beautiful, fair, small, and dressed in baby-blue overalls, and was struck instantly.

The dialogue was simultaneously cringier and cleverer than I thought it would be. The most moving part of the movie for me was a little monologue about deer hunting; I thought that was quite touching, and it came from the drunk otherwise involved in collapsing the movie. But I wish this story had been instead about Sissy Spacek and the male protagonist getting to know each other more and falling in love properly, and her eventually deciding for good reasons that she shouldn’t continue her doomed journey as a hippie hitchhiker. Instead, the film we got seemed unwilling to take Sissy’s character’s hurt seriously.

Watch it if you enjoy the 70s, and especially if you’re as enamoured with 70s Sissy Spacek as this old heart of mine is.