Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill

Locals gather at a country-western bar in Los Angeles on a stormy night, to watch, or to participate in, an amateur talent contest. The film has a top-notch ensemble cast that includes: Don Johnson, Candy Clark, Victor French, Dennis Quaid, and the wonderful Louise Latham.

This is a film about the hopes and dreams, the frustrations, and the disappointments of ordinary people. The script, in concert with adroit film editing, skillfully blends these themes into multiple plot lines, resulting in a believable story about people whose lives are confused and jumbled. The juxtaposition of humor with pathos lends irony and a sense of realism. And the film's music, which ranges from silly to sad, amplifies a broad range of human emotion.

One segment in particular shows how the screenplay cleverly interweaves discordant themes. A hilariously inept three-girl act, called the Nutter Sisters, begins to perform. As their singing act spirals out of control, the camera cuts away to the bar, where an embittered and alcoholic woman named Lettie, played by the inimitable Sheree North, enters into a serious conversation with the contest's judge, a washed-up and forgotten singer named Milt, played by Henry Gibson.

Lettie: "In this world, everyone needs a little anesthetic" (booze). Milt: "Alcohol is - well, you might get off on it for awhile, but it does you harm, so you can't achieve full use of what you got". Lettie: "Are you achieving full use of what you've got? You sang do-ahs on that record, how long ago? And where is your career now?" Milt (smiling): "I'll get it together, if I can. But either way, I'm going to do it without the bottle. Life's too short. And as the audience continues to laugh at the incompetent Nutter Sisters, Lettie responds: "Nope -- Life's TOO LONG".

Later, as a lonely, young woman named Marcy (Joan Goodfellow) starts to sing the mournful song "You're The King Of The Good Times", the camera again cuts away to the bar where Milt is fumbling with the cap of an aspirin bottle. Lettie helps him out: "It's a trick cap; only children can open it -- children and drunks".

"Amateur Night At The Dixie Bar And Grill" is not for everyone. People wanting: explosions, violence, sex, gore, special effects, or cinematic gimmicks, will need to go elsewhere. This is a more sedate, traditional type film. For people who like country-western music, and for those who enjoy richly drawn character studies, I give this film my highest recommendation.

There's no way on Earth this television film wasn't directly inspired by Robert Altman's Nashville. A story of a large group of people with the background being music in a country-like setting all dealing with little subplots? Yeah, this is the TV-movie version of Altman's classic take on Americana. Unfortunately, while I do admire the effort from Joel Schumacher who also wrote the original script, the 100-minute runtime prevents the kind of deep dive into the host of characters that Altman was able to achieve in a film nearly twice as long. That's unfortunate because there's an obvious eye towards character that really should work, but nothing quite connects, there's no real thematic underpinning to everything, and there's just not enough time to get invested in anything beyond the most basic of cinematic manipulations. Still, I kind of admire it.

The Dixie is owned by Mac (Victor French) and Fanny (Louise Latham), and in an effort to gin up business as well as give a platform to their wannabe musician son Roy (Dennis Quaid), they've arranged for an amateur talent night hosted by the local radio personality Marvin (Jeff Altman) to be judged by Milt (Henry Gibson). The rest of the cast is either performers or members of the audience, the most notable being Frank Smith (Timothy Scott), a mysterious fiddler with a violin case he won't let out of his sight, Doreen (Roz Kelly), a woman with an entourage and a plan to use the first prize of a two week engagement to launch a career in Vegas, Sharee (Candy Clark), a singer with stage fright, and Cowboy (Don Johnson), a ne'er-do-well who barely pays attention to what's happening on stage while he plays pool and ignores the loving looks of the waitress Lettie (Sheree North).

There are others as well, and the size of the cast isn't something that really bothers me. I like movies that spill over the edges, and this certainly does that. The problem is that everyone feels really thin, like they're archetypes rather than characters. They get, at most, one quick scene that's supposed to identify if they're good or bad or whatever troubles they have, and then we're off to other business. Ensemble pieces are hard to pull off because the delicate balance of story, character, plot, and everything else that goes into making narratives work spreads out thinner, making the underlying point of it all even more important. These things tend to be thematic pieces hiding as character pieces, and I don't think the characters here are ever all that interesting.

It's not helped by the fact that there are no less than three triumphant moments on the stage from different singers belting out their hearts, and we barely know any of them. It dilutes each effort, already diluted because the characters are so thin, and prevents them from actually hitting emotionally.

Plus, there's this subplot of a killer attacking bars in the area, the first three with names starting with the first three letters of the alphabet (D being the fourth), and it just...vanishes as a plotline about halfway through. It's used to paint one character as potentially dangerous, but when he's revealed to not be dangerous, well, no more talk of the Disco Killer. I mean, in a film where you're going to stuff to the gills the running time with character vignettes, wasting time on a mass shooter subplot that goes nowhere feels more like a sop to market the film than an actual effort to find an interesting story to tell.

However, all that being said, I do admire the effort from Schumacher to tell this character-focused story. It's hard to tell how they all connect except they're happening in the same space (I guess you could handwave to something like "the human experience" but that's a cop-out), but the very abbreviated stories are nice while the sheer scope of them is kind of impressive. I don't think any of them connect as well as they could if Schumacher had gotten another hour of screentime to tell the story (an argument for cutting out a whole bunch of them, to be honest), but they're all nice in their own way. If there's one that connects most fully, it would be Milt since he becomes the center of most of what happens late in the film, three different people trying to bribe him into choosing their favorite singer. It's a little vignette of self-discovery at his own internal strength after his telling about how he had spent two-years in AA after a failed music career. Maybe one way to address the film's issues is to make him the actual main character and focus while everything else happens around him? Maybe.

Anyway, I was never really bored, but I was also never really engaged. It's admirable from a young talent working with limited resources and a short running time to try and make something so ambitious, but it still doesn't quite work. It's also interesting to see Quaid, Johnson, and even Ed Begly Jr. (playing a stand-up comic) in very early roles. So, it was interesting, but it's not quite good. Maybe Schumacher, given more time and money, can pull things together.