Cinema: Primitive Odyssey

The magician came to camp and gave a show. He even put on a fireproof suit and ignited himself, but there was no applause. Later, when the magician was in his trailer making it with Randa, Glen stayed outside looking at maps. He found one of a place called Idaho, and some picture books about a lady named Wonder Woman who lives in a city called Metropolis that is all shiny and white and where people can fly. He asked the magician about it.

“The city’s far, far away, over the mountains,” the magician told him. “I was 15 when it was totaled. They was droppin’ dead in the streets for years.” “Take me to the city,” Glen said. But the magician had other business, so just like Prince Valiant on a quest for the Holy Grail, Glen set out for the city.

The record of the journey is Glen and Randa, a primitive, desperate odyssey by the last bewildered survivors of an atomic holocaust, stumbling through the wreckage of a vanished civilization. Neither moralizing sci-fi nor melodrama, despite its fanciful premise, the film is rather like a cinéma vérité doomsday documentary—a parable in newsreel form.

Using a rigorously unadorned style, Director Jim McBride, who was also coauthor of Glen and Randa’s script, conveys a sense of primitive desolation, transforming contemporary landscapes into primeval heaths. Although the film is unsparing in its apocalyptic vision, its dour brutality is frequently alleviated by a cool eye for satire. There is, for instance, a fine and funny sequence in which Glen decides to be (as he puts it) “see-villized” and sits down like a good suburban husband with his pipe and newspaper in front of a gutted television set.

It is easy enough to quarrel with McBride’s resolutely gloomy portrait of the future. But there is no disputing his distinctive cinematic flair or the definitive excellence of his relatively unknown actors—Steven Curry as Glen, Shelley Plimpton as Randa, and Garry Goodrow as the manic magician. McBride, 29, made Glen and Randa on a slender $480,000 budget, without help or hindrance from the major studios. Austerity and autonomy, combined with genuine talent, have produced one of the best and most original American films of the year.