The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 16-22
Sonny Boy (1989)
Directed by Robert Martin Carroll
Okay, trivializing and underestimating the strength and needs of neglected America was a bad idea. Who’s up for empathy? Apparently, 1989 audiences weren’t: Sonny Boy exited theatres swiftly, but charmed a cult audience with its simple folksiness… while also blowing up cops with cannons. Released at the close of Reagan’s hungover “Morning in America,” Sonny Boy finds more in common with post-’Nam nightmares while retaining a silver lining. Imagine if Raising Arizona were written a decade and change earlier, retooled by Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven, then shelved indeterminately, only to emerge long enough to ruin its director’s career. It’s a film intercutting hopelessness with hope, voiced by David Carradine’s country twang scoring an opening helicopter shot of the New Mexico desert: “Maybe there’s gold at the end of the rainbow/Or maybe it’s pain/But maybe it ain’t.” Carradine himself appears later as Pearl, mother hen to a trailer-dwelling crime family (Brad Dourif and king-sized kingpin Paul Smith) whose destitute spirits soar after the arrival of baby Sonny Boy (played as an adult by Michael Boston). The child’s tongue cut out and raised savagely, his emergence into manhood is met with Frankenstein-level mobs, some with beautiful faces hiding rotten teeth. Refreshingly, it’s conveyed via Roberto D’Ettorre Piazzoli’s crisp compositions, dignifying a part of the West dismissed as trash. Max Kyburz (November 16, 10pm at the Alamo Drafthouse)