Dirty Mary Crazy Larry - Netflix Instant Review - Blast From The Past

            This movie was made back in 1974 in Seattle with big names like Peter Fonda and Susan George.   Fonda plays Larry, a former race car driver, along with his partner and mechanic, Deke Sommers, hatch a plan to rob a supermarket when Deke takes the wife and the daughter of the manager hostage in their home while Fonda goes in to collect $150,000 from the safe from the manager in the supermarket. 

             The robbery goes off without a hitch and Larry seems to be on his way when Mary - a woman he had a one night stand with - is in the car and wants to let him know how angry she is because he left her in her room without saying goodbye.  Eventually, the three of them somehow drive away with the cops on their tail. 

              Much of the movie after that is about the police chasing Larry and his crew.  The police are tenacious and many of the chases are good.  I think that the idea was similar to all the Burt Reynolds movies regarding Smokey and the Bandit in developing this movie. 

              The characters are poorly developed to say the least.  You really don’t know until 3/4 of the movie that Larry was a former race car driver and Deke was his mechanic who drank himself off the circuit.  Then there was Mary, who was in jail for shoplifting.  The reason this bothered me so much was because if you want watch this movie from the beginning, you had to wonder why these characters were together in the first place and that didn’t make the story believable to me.

              Since this movie took place in 1974, I thought it was fun to see old cars, rotary phones, reel to reel tape recorders, and police scanners.  The police seemed like clowns in the movie - again relating to Smokey And The Bandit - although there was a good sequence of the police making Larry think that he was going to get caught during the chase.  

              I think that part of the goal of the movie was to make you root for Larry and his crew but that was difficult since you couldn’t like the characters.  That, and having one of the worst endings in the movie, showed that the script was not very good in any case.  

              Not one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but not a great movie either.  I would say 2-1/2 stars.  

Ron Hummer