A movie that I didn't know much about until the last time it showed up on TCM is The Grasshopper. The synopsis made the movie sound like it might be interesting, so once again I decided to record it so that I could eventually watch it and write up this post on the movie.
Jacqueline Bisset stars as Christine Adams, a young woman who lives in a small town in British Columbia but apparently has a boyfriend who's moved down south to the States. (I don't recall seeing the boyfriend in the movie, and looking at the credits, the boyfriend doesn't seem to appear.) As the movie opens, Christine has decided she's just going to get in her car and drive down to Los Angeles were said boyfriend lives to go live with him. Unfortunately for her, her car breaks down along the way, so she takes to hitch-hiking. Danny Raymond is a comic who is riding with his agent, and the two stop and pick her up. However, they're not going to Los Angeles but to Las Vegas, and they don't drop her off at the turnoff, suggesting that everybody needs to see Las Vegas at least once.
Christine needs a job, and she meets a guy who runs one of the smaller night spots in Vegas. This being Vegas, the floor show involves the women dancing topless. Christine says she acted in a production of Little Women in school, to which the manager asks if she did it topless, because this is the sort of club where people only come to see women's breasts. Not that he puts it quite that way, instead using a euphemism. But Christine gets the point and eventually responds by dropping her blouse and showing her prospective boss her assets, which gets her the job. There, she meets Jay (Christopher Stone), a seemingly nice young man in the house band who, it is intimated, is gay. She's introduced to Tommy Marcott (Jim Brown), a former NFL player now working as a greeter at one of the big hotels, living off his name. Christine and Tommy have a Las Vegas wedding.
But it doesn't quite work out. A piece of crap at the casino uses Christine to try to get to Tommy, and when she doesn't play along, he beats her, with Tommy responding by beating the shit out of this guy. Unfortunately, the guy has Mob connections. So when Tommmy and Christine move to Los Angeles, and just as it looks like Tommy is going to be able to get a legitimate job in the construction industry, that old guy from Las Vegas has one of his henchmen shoot Tommy dead in a hilariously badly staged scene.
It gets more hilarious when, on the way home from the funeral, Christine has her driver stop so she can pick up two random guys sitting at a bus stop because they look like the sort of guys who can ply her with good drugs. She supposedly spends several hours threatening to jump off the roof of her apartment building. Joseph Cotten (billed much too high for his smallish role) shows up as a sugar daddy offering Christine a better life that she ultimately doesn't care for. The story finally meanders its way to an airport where rich guys like the Cotten character hangar their private planes. Christine and a mechanic at the airport who is also a would-be pilot, steal one of the planes for the film's rather ridiculous finale that also has the two of them smoking what's presumably marijuana.
The Grasshopper is one of those movies that came out not too long after the Production Code finally disintegrated and filmmakers thought they could be more daring. You get the impression they wanted to be daring, but the finished product is less daring and more ridiculous. Also, the plot, such as it is, is a mess; to be fair, one might think of The Grasshopper as more of a character study. However, it has its points of being so ridiculous that it's a unintenionally funny. Bisset also gives a reasonbly good performance early in her career.
The Grasshopper got a Warner Archive release, so you can watch it whenever you want.
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