Film

Cutter's Way (1981)

Director: Ivan Passer

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A dazzling film noir out of the same paranoiac mould as Klute. It begins with classic murder as a girl's body is stuffed into a trash-can one stormy night. When the killer is tentatively identified as a fat-cat oil tycoon, stern retribution against the powers who never pay for their sins is demanded by Cutter (Heard), a horribly mutilated Vietnam veteran who hounds the tycoon to his doom, guilty or not. But the quixotic Cutter is gradually transformed into an Ahab pursuing his Moby Dick, and the hallucinatory quality of the film comes from its view of California as a paradise turned into a hunting-ground for the leviathans of speculation. As three minnows threshing desperately to avoid being engulfed, Cutter, his drunken wife (Eichhorn), and his beach-bum best friend (Bridges) are caught in a nightmarish personal triangle of extraordinary, constantly shifting complexity, rippling with secrecies and ambivalent emotions that escape easy definition. Amazing performances from Heard, Bridges and Eichhorn in one of the key films of the decade.

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