Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry **** 1974

(This review renosed and updated after the death of Peter Fonda in August 2019). On the back of his Easy Rider success, Hollywood didn’t know what to do with Peter Fonda, and he was shoe-horned into a number of vehicles in the hope of capturing a youth audience. Some of them, notably Race With The Devil, are great fun, and probably the best of Fonda’s work in this period is Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. Finding a sweet spot between the road-hippie odyssey of Easy Rider and the sunny automotive destruction of Smokey and the Bandit, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry cast Peter Fonda and Susan George as the titular ex-NASCAR driver and his girl as they evade the attentions of a corrupt sheriff and somehow strike a blow for all-American freedom by causing pile-ups and car smashes. The final helicopter chase is a high-water-mark of stunt-work, well handled by John Hough, and the ending is a absolute one-off that sticks in your mind forever. Simultaneously sociopathic and patriotic, it’s an anti-establishment drama without the politics, and shows Fonda’s free-wheeling charisma and anti-hero styling at its best.