Libertad condicional

This movie creeps up on you, gets a kind of emotional hold on you and digs in through the end. Really, a terrific 70s style film (should have been made in 1973). Dustin Hoffman is outstanding. He gives an understated performance that fits the atmosphere of the movie, the story and himself perfectly. It is one of his best performances. Theresa Russell, and Harry Dean Stanton also deliver excellent performances. A very good example of how story, and acting that is true to the story, matter so much in making a good film. Urls Grosbard does a good job of establishing the mood of the film and carrying it all the way through, without hitting you over the head with unnecessarily forced dialog or drawn-out action sequences, etc.

We meet Max Dembo (Dustin Hoffman) as he is getting out of prison on parole after six years. He has an arrogant condescending parole officer (M. Emmett Walsh) but yet he seems determined to go straight. He is supposed to go to a halfway house, but the parole officer gives him one week to find a place to live and get a job. He does that - modest ones for sure, but they qualify. He also meets a girl at the employment office in whom he gets interested, a very young Theresa Russell as Jenny Mercer. Jenny seems intrigued with Max, given that he is upfront about his criminal past.

The parole officer puts Max back in jail for suspicion of drug abuse, and after his urine test comes back clean he is released, but he has lost his job and his room. Max decides to get even with this guy and, on the way to the halfway house, commandeers the car, drags out the parole officer, and handcuffs him to a fence next to the highway with his pants around his ankles. Max takes off in his car and it is clear LA hasn't changed that much in 45 years as nobody comes to the officer's immediate aid. Max is now forced to go back to a life of crime, but it doesn't seem like he needs that much prodding. Complications ensue.

You're not sure who the real Max Dembo is. You meet all of his friends, ex-cons themselves, and they are as complex as Max is. They have working class lives with kids, wives, and cookouts, but don't need the hard sell to decide to go back to crime. It's not a hard decision for any of them. And you can see how they all got apprehended in the past - they all have their rash, greedy, and violent sides.

You never meet any of Max's family of origin. Being in his 30s you have no idea if he ever had enough time on the outside to make some kind of family of his own. Neither is ever mentioned. So he is a complete enigma, known only by what we see in this film and his criminal history, which is shown in the end credits. It's a very gritty crime film and character study, and a good example of what kind of films could be made after the production code completely collapsed that would have been hard to make just ten years before when it had only recently been disposed of.

My wife and I saw this in the theater at the time of its release, and I've never talked to anyone else who's seen it. This is among Dustin Hoffman's grittiest work, and he is superb (I've read that this is his favorite of his own films). Gary Busey, a gorgeous 20-year old Theresa Russell,and the old pro Harry Dean Stanton are all excellent. This film is among my all-time favorites, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Since reviews are required to be at least ten lines long, I'll add that it took me several minutes to recognize the young, skinny Kathy Bates, who was spot-on as Busey's justifiably concerned wife. I'm a fan of character actors, and M. Emmett Walsh is great as the asshole parole officer. I hope that this film will someday be re-released, ala Taxi Driver, and get a chance to prove itself to a new generation of audiences.

"Straight Time," hoisted high by a brilliant and dexterous performance by Dustin Hoffman, pulls off a very unusual trick: It's one of the only movies in memory where a character we fully identify with turns out to not be such a good guy - and stays that way. "Straight Time" begins on Max's (Hoffman) side and shows us what appears to be a handsome, wounded soul suffering at the hands of an injustice legal system. But Max turns out to be no angel, and yet through the very end, we care about his fortunes and want things to work out for him. It's a brave and gritty role, and Hoffman, on screen the entire film, embodies it. Compare "Straight Time" to "Monster," and see that Lee Wuornos and Max Deblor are cousins. Both characters are labyrinthine in their depth, and both actors find the perfect pitch.

This is such a great film. The cast is so excellent. You've got Dustin Hoffman, who turns in one of his best performances, but it only gets better from there. Gary Busey plays Hoffman's buddy and husband to Kathy Bates-both excellent. Harry Dean Stanton (probably one of my favorite actors) plays one of Hoffman's partners in heist. His performance is right on the money as always. M. Emmet Walsh plays Hoffman's nearly inhumanly sleazy parole officer. Walsh does such a good job here too(I read somewhere that the Coens saw him in this movie and that was what led them to cast him in Blood Simple). Theresa Russell does a nice job as Hoffman's girlfriend. Eddie Bunker himself shows up as a bartender. It's no one wonder Tarantino would want to study this film-it's remarkable.