Apparently this New World film has a bit of a cult reputation - it really isn't that good. It sure hates those fly-overs, though. Yvette Mimieux plays a professional woman who leaves life in LA (crummy boss, unfaithful partner) to drive across country to New York. On the way she is nice to a female traveller, sticks up to a snarly counter worker who tries to rip her off, gives a lift to a young couple (including Robert Carradine) who steal her car and leave her in a ditch, goes to help at a bar where the owner tries to rape her, is arrested by the police, is raped by a police officer who she then kills. Then a fellow prisoner (Tommy Lee Jones) escapes, taking her with her.
Normally you would expect in this sort of film for Mimieux to be radicalised and start robbing banks and rooting Jones and becoming a Hell cat, but that doesn't happen here. Mimieux just sort of whimpers and looks weak. Jones takes over the film - they go on the lamb, eventually the cops track them down, giving Jones a chance to die spectacularly at the end.
The film sort-of sets itself up as feminist (Mimieux being persecuted by men) - but then once she escapes from jail it becomes Jones' movie. Jones is in best glowering, good looking form - its kind of fun to see him paying dues in something like this and he's perfectly fine. The mess that the heroine gets in does fell quite contrived.
The film is not that very exploitive (little nudity - only a glimpse of Mimieux's breasts as she is being raped, but we very much feel her agony, the rape is not done salaciously like in some women in prison films) and there is some good action stuff towards the end. A bit of political "comment" - Jones saying he was "born dead", the final shoot out during a bicentennial parade - but it isn't rammed down our throats. A feminist article unfavourably compared the film with The Great Texas Dynamite Chase.
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