From End of the Road, Aram Avakian, 1970.
The actors are Stacy Keach and James Earl Jones.
What the hell, here’s the third one, which also featured in the Vanity Fair Hollywood memorial of Willis that I penned.
End of the Road is a fascinating motion picture, not just because it was cinematographer Willis’ debut feature. John Barth, the author of the 1958 novel on which it is based, dislikes the movie expansively. Being a fan of the book I anticipated I might come to a similar assessment, if I ever saw it. Which was difficult for some time. It became available for viewing under the aegis of Steven Soderbergh, who also made a documentary about its making; the movie and the doc are available via Warner Home Video. As it happens, Road, while not a very good adaptation of Barth’s book, is an engaging, sometimes mesmerizing, and ultimately affecting movie. In transposing the book’s action from the early ’50s to the then-present day, Avakian and his co-screenwriters Dennis McGuire and Terry Southern concoct an alienated counter-culture anti-parable. If Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore depicted personal and romantic dysfunction in Paris as an emblem of the failure of May ’68, Avakian’s picture implies a sour elegy for the Woodstock Nation. And its imagery is unfailingly striking and beautiful. There are worse things you could do this weekend than to seek it out.
A fine, if brief, tribute to the late cinematographer.
John Alton was another fine camera artist who understood darkness.
Willis gave the underrated HARPER sequel, THE DROWNING POOL (1975), a memorably murky look. Not a great movie, but it sure looks great.
Michael Chapman was one of his camera operators on End. He tells a great story about Terry Southern getting arrested after he was caught driving 5 mph, suitably disposed for such velocity.