Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry

I've been watching movies I've been recording off of FXM at the rate of about one a week now, and then blogging about them when there's another showing of them on the channel, which comes up all the time. This time around, the movie in question is Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. It will be on again tomorrow at 1:25 PM follwed by an further airing at 6:00 AM Wednesday.

Deke (Adam Roarke) pulls up to a house somehwere in central or northern California one morning. There, Deke's friend Larry (Peter Fonda) leaves his girlfriend Mary (Susan George) behind and gets in the car with Deke. The two have a job to do.

Larry is a would-be NASCAR driver, this being the era before the sport hit the big time and drivers were much more independent than today where it's all run by corporate teams. Larry is good, but needs more money to soup up his car to make it good enough to run on the NASCAR circuit. So together with Deke, he's come up with a plan to get enough money to do all that with his car. Of course, the plan isn't quite legal, or indeed anywhere close to legal.

Deke gets dropped off at the home of the Stantons, where the husband George (Roddy McDowall in an uncredited role) is a manager at the local supermarket; wife Evelyn (Lynn Borden) is a stay-at-home mom. Deke goes in the house and surprises Evelyn in the shower; the plan is to hold her and the daughter hostage. Meanwhile, Larry goes over to the supermarket, where a large shipment of cash is scheduled to arrive that morning.

Larry is supposed to hold up George at gunpoint, with Deke calling from the Stanton home to have Evelyn tell George the threat is real, and to open the safe and give Larry the money. This should also give Larry and Deke a head start on getting away and evading the police, although I'd think binding and gagging George and locking his office would be a better plan.

But at any rate, the actual robbery in the store goes well, at least until Larry gets back to his car outside the store. Larry was stupid enough not to take the keys with him, this being the 1970s and a smaller town where simply taking somebody else's car was apparently less likely to happen. So what does he find when he gets back to the car but Mary, and there isn't any way she's going to leave the car, especially not once she finds the $150,000 Larry got from the store.

So Larry and Marry pick up Deke, who is equally pissed at Mary's presence. Larry having had to argue with Mary before the getaway also cost them crucial time. Police officer Carl Donahue (Kenneth Tobey) is on the case, setting up and dissolving roadblocks, with Capt. Franklin (Vic Morrow) in a helicopter trying to find Larry's car and follow the criminals.

Larry and Deke's plan had them going to the walnut groves, where the police wouldn't be able to find them because of the density of the trees and the multitude of little roads will make it nigh on impossible for the police to find them. Meanwhile, Mary keeps bollixing up the getaway plans, making it easier for the police to follow them.

I guess the real reason to watch Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is for the car chases and crashes, and in that it does more or less succeed. The rest of the plot isn't really worth it since Mary is intensely dislikable while Larry and Deke aren't lovable antiheroes or even guys evading the law for a purpose we can root for like Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. Instead, everybody is at everyone else throats in a way that doesn't work like the noir era heist movies did.

If you like robbery and chase movies, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is adequate and should entertain you. But if you want to introduce other people to such movies, there's a lot better out there. Dirty Mary Crazy Larry did get a DVD release which seems to be available at Amazon but on backorder at the TCM Shop. The movie also seems to be available on Amazon Prime streaming video if you can do that.