Le fermier

I recently watched The Farmer after it was, very briefly, posted on YouTube. I had been wanting to see the film since I read a negative review for it twenty some years ago. The print was rather poor, but beggars can't be choosy.

I have seen all six Death Wish movies, both Exterminator films, both Get Carter movies, plus about a dozen other revenge films. My favorites are Rolling Thunder and the original Get Carter, the ending of which The Farmer borrows (with admittedly a slightly different outcome). I like revenge movies, but The Farmer was just so-so.

The plot has Kyle Martin (Gary Conway), a Silver Star winning WWII veteran, returning from the war to find his family farm about to be auctioned. He needs money fast. The farmer's life changes after he rescues a gambler (Michael Dante) from a car wreck. The two men take a shine to each other. Later, when the gambler is blinded by the local (Atlanta?) criminal machine, the gambler offers the farmer a deal. He will give Martin enough money to save his farm if the farmer kills the goons.

The shootouts and revenge scenes were grim, bloody, and exciting, but those were almost all in the last half-hour. What wore me down was the first half of the movie with its arty montages of farm life as Gene Clark plays in the background. Plus, in spite of having four writers, the film did not do that good of job at setting things up. All the bonding time the farmer and the gambler apparently had to justify the latter calling on the former to become a hitman is not in the film. Also missing is all of the set-up for the romance between the farmer and the gangster's moll (the lovely Angel Thompkins), who seems all too happy to give up her fast life to chase chickens around a farmyard.

The filmmakers seem unsure of what kind of movie they are making. The Gene Clark songs and much of the opening suggests a period rural drama. It is also a gangster film and, at the end, a revenge film. Its odd structure reminds me a little of another film, Framed with Joe Don Baker, which begins as a movie about gamblers, becomes a prison flick, and also ends a revenge movie. However, the structure of Framed seems deliberate while The Farmer feels a bit confused about what it wants to be.

Is The Farmer worth watching? Yes, providing one has reasonable expectations. However, had the film been released on VHS tape by Columbia in the early 1980's, I don't think its cult would have been as strong. Had I saw The Farmer as a young man, around the same time I saw Young Warriors (a revenge film I champion), I might have more nostalgia for it, but I think I still would have preferred Young Warriors. Regardless, The Farmer has come a little late in my film viewing life for it to stand out.

I noticed that some reviews complained about the quality of the print on YouTube for "The Farmer". Well, I found it on the Tubi app and it's near perfect in quality...crisp, and looking like new.

The story begins just after WWII...though you cannot tell this by hairstyles (especially of the women), cars (most are 1950s vintage), some of the fashions (particular shoes) and a 1970s style train that you see about ten minutes into the story. Trust me...it IS supposed to be 1945 or 1946 at the latest. I think I noticed this stuff because I am an ex-history teacher and I often notice what the average person might not. My aunt thinks I'm a nut about this...and she's probably right. Regardless, either they didn't have the money to get it right or they just didn't care.

Aboard a train, a returning soldier, Kyle (Gary Conway of "Land of the Giants" fame), intervenes when a nasty group of bigots are harassing a black man (with 70s hair). For his troubles, Kyle's tossed off the train and must walk a long way to his farm. However, when he arrives he learns from his hired hand that the place is in foreclosure and is a mess. Kyle tries to re-negotiate the loan with the bank with no success. He just can't seem to catch a break.

Soon after this, there's a car wreck near Kyle's farm. He and his hired hand save the guy in the car just before it explodes...and the guy turns out to be a gambler. Soon after this, the gambler is kidnapped by local mobsters and deliberately blinded with acid! He tries to hire Kyle to kill them, as he himself doing it would be problematic (but NOT unheard of...see "Master of the Flying Guillotine" if you don't believe me). But Kyle isn't THAT desperate for money. However, later, after his hired hand is murdered and a woman Kyle cares about is violently raped, he decides he could use the $50,000 bounty the gambler has put on the hoods.

What follows is quite violent by 1970s movie standards. In addition to the rape and acid attack, there are a lot of murders (such as by using a garrote, putting a gun to a man's mouth and pulling the trigger and a lot of other bloody methods) and a bit of nudity. It clearly is NOT a family movie and you might want to consider this before you show it to your kids or Father O'Malley if he stops by for a visit.

So despite the violence and terrible attention to 1940s details, is it any good? Well, the story actually isn't bad...and I loved the way the movie ended. The acting also isn't bad considering most of the actors are relatively smalltime. But it's also unpleasant and something you may find too much so. It all just depends on you and your tastes. I think it's a movie crying out for a bigger budget remake. I was shocked that despite its problems and cheapness it's STILL a very good movie.

By the way, the ballistics in the film are nutty. You cannot blow a man across a road about 10 feet with a shotgun blast. Heck, a tank would have a hard time doing that! In fact, if hit by a shotgun blast, you'd probably just fall down...not go flying.

In the immediate wake of WW2, a decorated soldier returns to his small rural farm, now in a state of disrepair and facing imminent foreclosure. After saving the life of a smalltime racketeer in a road accident, and latterly taking up with his pert young lady-friend, a string of increasingly brutal intimidations perpetrated by local gangsters pushes him to his breaking point. Throwing his humble virtuosity over his shoulder, he proceeds to wage bloody war against the town's iniquitous mob kingpin and his degenerate scumbag lackeys.

Following its limited and somewhat controversial 1977 release, THE FARMER remained virtually unseen and largely forgotten for decades. With the advent of social media, occasional mention of the film led to increased interest, and THE FARMER became widely noted as a lost, or at least uncommonly unattainable picture. After a few ensuing screenings and an unauthorized Youtube upload of poor quality, the film finally received a proper Blu-ray release, and it was well worth the wait.

As one of many vigilante justice/vengeance pictures made after the unexpected runaway success of DEATH WISH(1974), THE FARMER is certainly among the cheapest and most graphic of the lot. GARY CONWAY, possibly most noted as a beefcake actor in 60s B films, provides an appropriately staid performance as the archetypal decent man, driven by villains to decidedly not-so-decent, but ultimately condign acts of violence. Lovely ANGEL TOMPKINS is equally suitable as his brassy but principled love interest, and their support players perform accordingly. The late-40s period styling(cars, apparel, interior furnishings, etcetera), is surprisingly well appointed for a low budget film, the exception being a brief scene shot during an actual street parade, wisely presented as a consecution of rapid jump-cuts to minimize the observable 1977 fashions of the crowd.

The first few expository minutes are a bit patchy, and an iterant folk ballad is overused, but THE FARMER is a film easily forgiven of its various shortcomings. It's a tense, excessively violent, and occasionally poignant film imbued with a cynical postwar noir mien, variably redolent of pulp paperbacks by writers such as Jim Thompson and David Goodis. Now that it's readily available, I suspect the film will medialize an enthusiastic viewership, and hopefully receive some long-withheld acknowledgements.

7/10...better late than never.

A passion project for producer / star Gary Conway ("I Was a Teenage Frankenstein", 'Burkes' Law'), "The Farmer" casts him as the title character, otherwise known as Kyle Martin. Kyle is a WWII hero, just returned home, who intends to run the family farm, which is not seen as profitable by the local bank. They would rather foreclose. Then one night, a gambler named Johnny O'Neal (Michael Dante, "Winterhawk") has a car accident on the road, and Kyle saves his life. Johnny sends his gal pal Betty (gorgeous Angel Tompkins, "The Teacher") to gift Kyle with $1,500 for the good deed, but of course it's not enough for the bank. Johnny subsequently gets blinded by vindictive mobsters, and he gives Kyle a proposal: rub out the mobsters, and he can walk away with a cool $50 thousand. Kyle initially refuses, but inevitably changes his mind.

A "lost" film for many years, this only debuted on home video this year. So, was the wait to see this flick worth it? Well, this viewer wouldn't really consider it a *classic* of its genre, but it serves as good, straightforward entertainment - albeit with a nasty edge to it. One thing is for sure: the bad guys / intended victims in this saga do have it coming to them. Although the main mobster is a guy named Passini (George Memmoli ("Phantom of the Paradise"), looking relatively svelte), the worst of the bunch is a dude appropriately named Weasel. Played by the late, great Timothy Scott ("The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez"), Weasel is as despicable as they come.

Conway is just okay as a rather stoic, unemotional character, although the opening sequence sets him up well as a man of honor, who doesn't want to see a black fellow serviceman get disrespected. Still, he makes for a memorable image here, with his hat, shades, and stogie almost constantly clamped between his teeth. Tompkins and Dante are good in support; Memmoli makes the most of his one big scene. Sonny Shroyer ('The Dukes of Hazzard'), Johnny Popwell ('Deliverance'), and Eric Weston (the future director of the horror film "Evilspeak") co-star.

Granted, some of the dialogue is pretty lame, even if four credited people worked on this script, including story author George Fargo. And the music score was inconsistent - sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. At least the songs are pretty nice. And the script *does* work in an amusing surprise near the end, so it wasn't *entirely* predictable.

If you love exploitation cinema of the 70s, or a decent, no-nonsense revenge feature, you'll likely have a good time with this one.

Seven out of 10.

I was fortunate enough to see this film, and it is one of the best 70's style revenge film, but also wisely uses screen time to build up the plight of the lead character, and also has some great "revenge" sequences.You can see why Columbia pictured decided to release this. The film starts with the lead, Kiel Martin (Gary Conway) in a train, and how he gets beat up and kicked off a train for helping a black soldier buy a drink (it was no-no back then) as this shows what a decent character he is, but how he can't seem to escape violence since earning a silver star in the War.

Through a chain of events (some of them rather rushed, so I assume it was either explained in the original script or that scene was cut out for time) he is hired by a gangster (Michael Dante) to go after the gangsters who blinded him, and in return, give him the cash needed to save the farm! And thru a pulsating music score by Hugo Montenegro, he dispatches them one by one! It is more similar to ROLLING THUNDER in the nihilistic feel revenge genre, and only weak point of the film is Gary Conway, who is rather bland, and too "city" to be really convincing as the title character. Still it is a classic for it's era,and not to be missed by any fans of this genre. Just dont expect it to be in vain with todays action films ,as the unavailability of this title for 26 years has caused this film to be in so many peoples must see list,that their expectation level must be really high, so I am afraid they might be rather disappointed with what to expect of it.

Just enjoy the more "character driven, and that character reaches to the point of revenge" films of yesteryears, then you will agree, THE FARMER is right near the best of them, like ROLLING THUNDER, FIGHTING MAD and BREAKING POINT. In fact, I think Fred Williamson might have been influenced by this film, as his film MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS is very very similar in the storyline department with THE FARMER. He also hired Dante in THE BIG SCORE so he must have really liked THE FARMER.