Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (John Hough, 1974)

Peter Fonda didn’t abandon his wheels after being blown away as a biker in Easy Rider. Instead, he tried his luck at souped-up cars and even a Winnebago (Race with the Devil). Asphalt was in his blood.

1974’s Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry opens with a robbery at a supermarket that seems to have inspired the story from Tim Roth’s Pumpkin in Pulp Fiction, the one about the bloke who stole from a bank with a phone instead of a gun. Along with his partner, Deke (Adam Roarke, also taking a break from the motorcycle films for which he was famous), Fonda’s Crazy Larry flees the scene with a bag of money in hand and an unplanned passenger in the back seat, Dirty Mary (Susan George, an actress with a truly unsettling set of choppers).

Then we settle in for the duration, with Larry, Mary, and Deke on the run from overzealous cop Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow) and fighting amongst themselves. Larry and Mary are at each other with an endless stream of crude and goofy dialogue, referring to each other by pet names like “super crotch,” “dingleberry,” and other such hypocorisms. Larry is a bit of a misogynist, talking about breaking the bones in Mary’s crotch, and braiding her tits; maybe he’d be better off with Deke.

A car fetishist’s dream, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry features a number of beautiful vehicles tearing ass through rural pastures. There are even some great helicopter shots as Franklin pursues from above (the dark irony of Morrow spending so much time in a helicopter can’t go unnoticed). But apart from all the rolling and flying gas guzzlers on display, the real star of the show is Roarke’s Deke. He’s one of the film’s few sympathetic characters, particularly in comparison to the bickering titular couple.

Falling somewhere between more existential chase films like Two Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point and silly thrill rides like Gumball Rally and Cannonball, the finale of John Hough’s film is what undeniably elevates the film into the former strata. — Mike White

Tags: Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Peter Fonda, Susan George, Vic Morrow, Two Lane Blacktop