Trente-sept degrés à l'ombre

Don't miss this little treat of a film. If you liked The Hired Hand, this has the same laid back style that works great for a Southern story. But it's not so much the story. It's the ripe dialog and a cast of Great American Actors that make this one to catch. Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton make a great team of ornery fishing guides. Burgess Meredith has a great role and makes the best of it. Margot Kidder looks absolutely great here too. But Joe Spinell is worth the price of admission in a small role. The cinematography is experimental like The Hired Hand but is not as successful. Overall, this film is a gentle surprise and would be perfect for a warm evening. Recommended without hesitation.

I was a bit disappointed, because 92 in the Shade was my favorite book of that period. I even lifted it from the library in Arizona. I found it later under the seat of my pickup when I was living down on the Gulf of Mexico.

I would differ with the other reviewer, in that I don't find a comparison between this film and Fonda's other Florida picture, "Ulee's Gold." That movie was simply the best performance Peter Fonda ever gave. In "92 in the Shade," we still come away thinking Fonda's mind was elsewhere while he was acting - and 'elsewhere' was far more interesting to him.

This film right here! Great cast, but the movie is a snoozefest, a total bore!!

Thomas McGuane had a little Hollywood vogue in the mid-1970s, with this movie and "Rancho Deluxe" the same year, then big-budget "Missouri Breaks" the next. The latter film was famously a victim of Marlon Brando's disinterest in following the script, which of course made the writer unhappy. All of these movies were commercial disappointments, so the vogue came to a fast end.

Today "Breaks" has its defenders (though I think it's still a very mixed bag), "Rancho Deluxe" looks like an underrated minor classic of the period, and "92 in the Shade" (which shares some of the same cast as "Rancho") remains a misfire you keep hoping will be better than it is. The typically blank, low-energy Peter Fonda aside, it's got a theoretically fine cast. But the movie just never quite works in translating McGuane's distinctive literary sensibility to the screen--and that is because McGuane as film director (for the first/last time) has no idea how to stage scenes or pace the whole. There's no variation in tone, no overall suspense or tension, which is unfortunate because the very heart of his writing is its loopy mixture of wacky humor and narrative intrigue. None of that comes across here, despite characters and incidents that ought to work.

The film just pokes along neutrally from one sequence to another, getting no particular flavor from the Florida coastal setting, generating no sense of peril even though it ends in violence (and both Warren Oates and Burgess Meredith in unusually negative, unsympathetic roles). The characters are superficially colorful but fail to come alive; Elizabeth Ashley's wife (to Harry Dean Stanton, much better used in "Rancho," which she was also in) never transcends caricature, and Margot Kidder's girlfriend is just The Girl. These are actors with so much personality, it's amazing that the film manages to make them uninteresting. It's not a terrible film, but McGuane's inexperience means the dominating tone isn't his eccentric authorial one, it's the default competence of his crew, who pretty obviously made most of the technical decisions themselves for lack of much directorial guidance.

Anyway, watching this in close proximity with "Rancho Deluxe" and "The Missouri Breaks" (both of which I'd originally seen in the 70s) underlined that "Rancho" remains the one movie that did Thomas McGuane justice. (Admittedly, I haven't seen "Tom Horn"--but I have seen "The Sporting Club," unfortunately, and that's as much a misfire as "92," although in a much more bombastic, self-important way.)

If you are into bell bottoms, hipsters, and quirky characters, this is your movie. Peter Fonda as usual, sleepwalks through the scenery. Warren Oates is his off kilter self, and Harry Dean Stanton is along for the ride. The supporting cast is uniformly eccentric. Unfortunately the story plays like an instructional fishing film. There are more than a few tedious moments. If you have the patience to listen carefully, some of the dialog is amusing, but not enough to sustain momentum. Ultimately, the film must be regarded as nothing more than a curiosity, with absolutely no surprises from the plot, and a very predictable ending - MERK