What was the secret of the movie's box-office success? Mostly good old sex and violence, a dash of Southern charm, and a heap of injustice.
The final half hour of the movie does pick up some good momentum, but it's a long time coming. Then the last few minutes get tense, and the story ends in a series of ironies. Whether that's worth the wait is up to the individual viewer. It wasn't for me.
Trivia: Baer prefaces his film with the words "This story is true. Only the names and places have been changed." I don't know if he meant that as a joke or not, but I've read that the story is not true. Baer made it up. Still, it seems like a "Blair Witch Project" or "Cloverfield" kind of thing years before anybody else invented it.
More trivia: Although the movie takes place in Louisiana, Baer filmed it around the Sacramento Delta in central California. A few years earlier, filmmakers made "Cool Hand Luke," also set in the South, in and around Lodi and Stockton in central California. Hollywood magic; you go where it's cheapest.
Yet more trivia: Look for character actor Geoffrey Lewis in the part of a garage mechanic. You'll recognize him instantly because you've seen him so often. Yet, like most good character actors, his name is not exactly a household word. The thing about him is that he never changes. He's thirty-odd years older now, but he still appears regularly in motion pictures and still plays almost the identical role. Comforting, you know? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Video:
Speaking of "things," things in the video department do not exactly get off to an auspicious start with an opening nighttime sequence so grainy it looks as though the filmmakers shot it with a gauze pad over the camera lens. Luckily, the excessive print grain clears up considerably during the daylight scenes, even though it retains a soft, dull, light-toned quality throughout. To the good, WB present the film in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio in an anamorphic transfer that displays no extraneous scratches, lines, or age marks. In fact, the image looks like something you'd expect to see at a drive-in movie theater thirty or forty years ago.
Audio:
There's not much to say about the sound. "Macon County Line" was a super low-budget production, and the audio suffers accordingly. The disc offers it in Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural processing that comes across a little hard and pinched, with limited frequency and dynamic ranges but an interesting sense of depth.
Extras:
There are no extras to speak of. You get nine scene selections, but they don't even appear on a selections menu; you have to use your remote to click forward or back. English is the only spoken language option, with French subtitles and English captions for the hearing impaired.
Parting Shots:
Viewing "Macon County Line" today, it's hard to see why it became so popular, even among the drive-in theater crowd. Yet if we look at it in the context of the times, the mid 1970s, it did enough things new and copied enough things old to seem almost innovative. The trouble is, we have to look at it now, and, frankly, it doesn't offer much to justify one's time.
Trivia: Baer prefaces his film with the words "This story is true. Only the names and places have been changed." I don't know if he meant that as a joke or not, but I've read that the story is not true. Baer made it up. Still, it seems like a "Blair Witch Project" or "Cloverfield" kind of thing years before anybody else invented it.
More trivia: Although the movie takes place in Louisiana, Baer filmed it around the Sacramento Delta in central California. A few years earlier, filmmakers made "Cool Hand Luke," also set in the South, in and around Lodi and Stockton in central California. Hollywood magic; you go where it's cheapest.
Yet more trivia: Look for character actor Geoffrey Lewis in the part of a garage mechanic. You'll recognize him instantly because you've seen him so often. Yet, like most good character actors, his name is not exactly a household word. The thing about him is that he never changes. He's thirty-odd years older now, but he still appears regularly in motion pictures and still plays almost the identical role. Comforting, you know? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Video:
Speaking of "things," things in the video department do not exactly get off to an auspicious start with an opening nighttime sequence so grainy it looks as though the filmmakers shot it with a gauze pad over the camera lens. Luckily, the excessive print grain clears up considerably during the daylight scenes, even though it retains a soft, dull, light-toned quality throughout. To the good, WB present the film in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio in an anamorphic transfer that displays no extraneous scratches, lines, or age marks. In fact, the image looks like something you'd expect to see at a drive-in movie theater thirty or forty years ago.
Audio:
There's not much to say about the sound. "Macon County Line" was a super low-budget production, and the audio suffers accordingly. The disc offers it in Dolby Digital 1.0 monaural processing that comes across a little hard and pinched, with limited frequency and dynamic ranges but an interesting sense of depth.
Extras:
There are no extras to speak of. You get nine scene selections, but they don't even appear on a selections menu; you have to use your remote to click forward or back. English is the only spoken language option, with French subtitles and English captions for the hearing impaired.
Parting Shots:
Viewing "Macon County Line" today, it's hard to see why it became so popular, even among the drive-in theater crowd. Yet if we look at it in the context of the times, the mid 1970s, it did enough things new and copied enough things old to seem almost innovative. The trouble is, we have to look at it now, and, frankly, it doesn't offer much to justify one's time.
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[release]23714[/release]