Another of those 1970s movies that I'd never heard of before seeing it in the TCM schedule was Sweet Revenge. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, I recorded it to watch it later and do a review. Having finally gotten around to watching it, I can now do the review.
The movie opens up outside a Seattle-area car dealership one night, where two twentysomethings are looking in. On a revolving platform is a Ferrari Dino, a limited-edition sportscar that the young lady looking in, Vurrla (Stockard Channing), tells her boyfriend Andy that she's going to have a Dino one day. He naturally assumes she's planning on stealing a Dino, since the car is well outside their means, $20,000 in mid-1970s dollars. But it's not something she can steal, since it's made in such limited numbers that it would be easily traced. Her plan is to get the money a bit at a time, by stealing other cars.
Cut to her stealing one of those other cars, a nice convertible sports car. She unsurprisingly get caught in the car, transporting a large wall mirror, and since she's got an out-of-state license and can't produce the registration, the police take her down to the county jail, where she doesn't even have the money to be bailed out.
The public defender's office sends Le Clerq (Sam Waterston) to the prison to learn about her case. He calls her Dandy, that presumably being the name on her fake ID. She starts crying about how she doesn't have a record and doesn't want to wind up in prison, and that the cops are just using her to get at Jimmy. Of course there is no Jimmy, but Le Clerq isn't going to figure this out until after the initial hearing, where he gets her off on personal recognizance, as long as she signs a statement that she'll appear again in 15 days' time.
That bit about there being no Jimmy is only the first of many, many like Vurrla is going to tell Le Clerq. She lies about where she lives, she engages in shoplifting, and she unsurprisingly skips out on the court appearance. Oh, and later in the movie she's going to cajole Le Clerq into engaging in another of her shoplifting schemes. But the real plan is to steal some lesser cars, make them appear legal with the help of car stereo thief Edmund (Franklin Ajaye), and then sell the not-quite legal cars to unsuspecting marks. Of cours, the law is going to catch up with her eventually....
Sweet Revenge is a movie that got a very limited release back in the 1970s and a re-release in the early 1980s. Upon the re-release, the critics panned it, and it's easy to see why. Channing is playing a thoroughly nasty piece of work, a manipulator who lies to everybody around her and is frankly exhausting to be with I didn't like her, and this is the sort of movie where you really need to like the protagonist for the movie to work.
On the other hand, people who enjoy the sort of non-mainstream movies that Hollywood's new filmmakers were making in the 1970s may well enjoy Sweet Revenge. Be warned that this is a movie that's decidedly not for everyone.
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