"MACON COUNTY LINE"........THE BEVERLY KIILLBILLY........

Macon County Line (1974)    This odd, unsettling little movie could only have existed in the 1970's......

                Why?  First........the mark of a true 70's melodrama - a crushing, downbeat ending. Life sucks and we're all gonna die.

                 This mindset infected movies of all genres and pedigrees........whether they were slapped-together exploitation fodder for the drive-ins (like "Macon County Line") or top-of-the-line, all-star studio concoctions ("The Parallax View", "Chinatown", etc, etc)

                  You couldn't fault the movies for reflecting the temper of the times.......Vietnam raged on and on with no light at the end of the tunnel, Nixon skulked through the White House, enlarging the useless war rather than presiding over an American defeat.  On the homefront, a generational war ripped the country apart, in addition to the always festering racial divisions.

                   A deep distrust of all authority figures, from the President right down to the local Sheriff seeped through the culture. Good guys could struggle and fight........but the bad guys were runnin' the show and in the movies, as in life, they always got the last word.

                    Secondly........"Macon County Line" blazed a trail for an entire genre of redneck potboilers.......with the Deep South depicted as a steamy horrorshow, crawling with trigger happy bigots, racist bullies and souped-up cars racing away from the cops.  And in the 70's, before real estate developers eventually gobbled them all up for condos and shopping centers,  there were still enough drive-in theaters whose audiences feasted on such movies.

                     "Macon County Line" falsely claimed it was 'based on a true story'.  Yeh, sure. It wasn't.

                       More likely, it resembled the kind of semi-creepy tales that beer-soaked good ole boys told each other around the campfire during hunting trips...…a Southern Gothic that almost sounds believable.....if  you're 4 cans into a 6-pack. ('Y'all hear the one 'bout what happened down in Macon County a couple years ago?")

                      Sure enough, it became a deep-fried hit on the drive-in circuit.......and watching it again, the damned thing still fascinates us.......

                     Even when it revels in its overheated, trashy plot,  at any given minute the film looks like it's ready to erupt into a genuinely skilled, thoughtful tale.

                      Written by and starring Max Baer Jr. (who reigned as the Li'l Abner-like Jethro on "The Beverly Hillbillies") the film quickly cooks up a recipe for tragedy.  Two footloose, hell-raisin' brothers, (real like brothers Jesse and Alan Vint) and a sweet, hot-to-trot hitchhiker (Cheryl Waters) run afoul of a small town's authoritative deputy (Baer.)

                      As a screenwriter, Baer surprisingly created an intelligent, even handed version of a character most films of this genre treated as a stock, cartoonish villain.  His Deputy Morgan is a decent, loving family man, but a firm segregationist with little or no use for blacks.....or troublemakin' white kids, for that matter.

                     And he quietly but aggressively intimidates our trio of young travelers, stranded when their car breaks down in the Deputy's Redneck-Ville. With polite menace, he warns 'em to move on down the road or risk a vagrancy charge cause they have less than 10 bucks in their pockets.

                        While the Deputy's picking up his young son from military school (warning him to stop playing basketball with those black kids across the street), his wife is raped and murdered by yet another pair of drifters..........and you guessed it...... the lawman, mistakenly pinning the blame on our three lovable vagrants, goes on a shotgun rampage with his little boy in tow, the poor kid already traumatized by the sight of his dead, blood soaked mom.

                      Okay, in the interests of anyone who hasn't seen this....SPOILER ALERT,  DON'T DARE READ THIS PARAGRAPH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.....).....here comes the killer twist that gave the movie the extra punch it needed to goose the drive-in crowds........Max Baer takes a fatal bullet as the brothers defend themselves.......but his shell shocked tyke picks up Pop's shotgun and blows away one of the bros and the hitchhikin' hottie.  As the surviving brother drives away, no one yells out "Y'all come back, here..."

                       As we pointed out, dozens of little moments come close to lifting this movie into something far better than it ever intended to be.  In the midst of all the local non-actors in the cast, all of a sudden, instantly recognizable character actors like Emile Meyer and Doodles Weaver pop up.....(one brilliant little camera shot, in which a black waitress glances at Baer with fear and loathing, speaks volumes.....)

                       And there's a priceless, hysterical bit of comedic improv between Alan Vint and the reliable Geoffrey Lewis, playing the town's befuddled garage mechanic.

                        More of a tiny historical cinematic signpost than a full-fledged movie, "Macon County Line" still remains oddly watchable........(but no more than once.)  We'll fry up 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2) for this vivid, nasty throwback to 70's Hillbilly Hell.......