wilbrifar

This film features wonderful documentary footage of Los Angeles circa 1959, and is a valuable artifact for that reason alone. Unfortunately, the woeful attempt to form the footage into a narrative featuring actress Barbara Baxley as a lonely woman wandering the city and sharing insufferably pretentious voice-over with Gary Merrill (pompously billed as "The Poet") make the film a chore to endure.

I enjoy seeing this kind of footage, showing me how a city I love looked in another age, but the grandstanding voice-over is a deal breaker. Except for the disturbing faith-healer sequence, which is the only portion of the film to use sync sound, this is a movie best enjoyed with the volume turned down and some good music playing, maybe a little jazz from the era.

All you folks complaining that this is amateur film-making because the boom is visible in several shots don't understand how movies are made. In order to get good sound on dialog, the mike is hung very close to the subject. It is almost always captured on film, but in the area which is not meant to be seen by an audience, as the square film frame is supposed to be matted at top and bottom by the projectionist when shown in a theater, or by the technician when transferring film to video.

In the case of Walking Tall, whoever supervised the transfer to video did so "open matte", meaning they transfered the ENTIRE film frame without proper matting, hence the visible boom. This was not carelessness on the part of the filmmakers, but on the part of whoever put it out on video. You'd see microphone booms in Star Wars if it were transfered to video this way.

When I saw Walking Tall in the theater, it did not have visible booms. Blame the video release, not the filmmakers.

The hit-and-miss DePalma has churned out a few duds in his time, but none worse than this insufferable train wreck of a film. Actually, calling it a film is giving it the benefit of the doubt, as it resembles not so much a movie as a highlight reel of every cinematic trope DePalma has used in his career. (Which were, of course, already ripped off from other directors when he used them the FIRST time.) If the cast of SNL or MAD TV were making a spoof of DePalma films, it might feel like this. (Although it couldn't possibly be this bad, not even if it starred Rob Schneider.)

The clumsy, inept proceedings feel rushed and sloppy, as though this thing were just cranked out as some sort of tax write-off, or to satisfy a contractual agreement. If you can manage to stay awake until the ending, you'll get to see the only gimmicky shot in the film that DePalma has NEVER used before! But have no fear, he hasn't gone and gotten original; the shot is stolen directly from Dario Argento's TENEBRE, which was made 10 years earlier.

So I guess that's the whole purpose of the film: to add one more stolen gimmick to DePalma's already bloated bag of tricks.