Down By Law

I've made no bones over the 15 years that I've been doing this blog that I tend to watch older movies a lot more than more recent stuff, with "more recent" being after I was born, and certainly the 1980s and later. Not that I don't want to watch more recent stuff, of course, if it sounds interesting. An indie 1980s movie I didn't know anything about until I saw it show up in the TCM schedule was Down By Law. So, as always, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do a review on it.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence showing a lot of camera panning over lower-class housing in New Orleans along with some of the environs. In and among these shots are two guys getting in bed with a girlfriend (different girlfriends, of course). After the credits, we find that the two aren't in the best of relationships. Zack (Tom Waits) is a disk jockey whose girlfriend is the primary tenant in the apartment, paying the rent, and feeling like Zack doesn't appreciate her. So she gets in an argument with him, throwing 45s at him, and kicking him out. Cut to a shot of Zack outside one of those balconied buildings that show up in lots of films set in New Orleans.

Jack (Tom Lurie) is a white pimp sleeping with a black woman who makes trenchant comments about Jack's white hookers. Jack is waiting to have a meeting with Fatso, a man who procures women for Jack. When Fatso gets to the apartment he tells Jack he's got a 19-year old "Cajun goddess" for Jack to pimp out. Things aren't going to work out for either Zack or Jack.

Jack goes to meed that "Cajun goddess", only to find out that she's a minor, and this this was a set-up by some of Jack's enemies to get him arrested and out of the pimp game. As for Zack, he starts drinking, until a guy offers him an obscene sum of money to drive a car across town and park it there. That sort of easy money should be a warning sign, but Zack is too stupid or drunk to realize it. In the trunk of the car is a dead body, and Zack is found out when he's pulled over.

The two stories come together because, as you might be able to guess, the two men are put in the same jail cell until they can await trial. They don't know each other and once they get to know each other they find that they don't like each other at all. If that sounds bad enough, things are only going to get worse thanks to the introduction of a third arrestee. Roberto (Roberto Benigni), nicknamed Bob, is an Italian tourist with a limited command of English. He gets arrested on a manslaughter charge and put in the same cell with Zack and Jack.

The three have to try to get along somehow, with Zack and Jack at each other's throats and Bob not understanding how much he's bugging the other two, since his English isn't good enough to pick up on that. Worse, Bob thinks that the three of them can escape jail just like that. And wouldn't you know, but the three of them do come up with an escape plan.

However, that plan involves the three of them making their way through the bayous of southern Louisiana, a place none of the three knows very well and where it will be easy for them to get lost. And they still have their disagreements from jail to deal with....

Jim Jarmusch isn't the most mainstream director out there, and if you watch his movies it's not difficult to see why. In the case of Down by Law, Jarmusch decided to use stark black-and-white photography, which works for the urban scenes although not so much for the bayou scenes. There's also a decided air of unrealisticness here, which may work for some but didn't quite work for me. Not that Down by Law is a bad movie; it's more the sort of thing that isn't going to appeal to everyone.