Straight Time: Dustin Hoffman's Ex-Con Realism

Most crime films about a man leaving prison are interested in the job he pulls afterwards. Straight Time is interested in the fortnight before it, and specifically in the paperwork. Max Dembo comes out, and what the film gives him is a hotel room in a bad part of Los Angeles, a list of rules, a set of appointments he must not miss, an employment requirement he cannot satisfy, and a parole officer with a desk and an opinion. The robbery arrives eventually. By then the picture has made a case that the robbery was administrative — that a system with these incentives will produce this outcome at industrial scale, and that Max’s personal appetite for crime, which is real, is only one input among several.

It is a film about process, and it was made by people who knew the process from the inside.

Bunker was there

The novel is No Beast So Fierce, published in 1973 by Edward Bunker, and Bunker’s biography is the reason the film has the texture it has. He was a career criminal — armed robbery, forgery, drugs — who had been in and out of institutions since childhood and did serious time in San Quentin, where he began writing and kept failing to get published for years. No Beast So Fierce was his first sale, written from a position no screenwriter could research.

Bunker worked on the film, appears in it, and became a fixture of American crime cinema thereafter: he co-wrote Runaway Train, saw Animal Factory filmed by Steve Buscemi, and turned up as Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, cast for exactly the authenticity that shows up in every frame of this picture. That lineage matters, because the specific thing Bunker brought was not tough talk. It was the small print. Which forms. Which lies work. How a bail bondsman speaks to you. Why a man with a record cannot get an ordinary job even when he genuinely wants one, and what he does at the end of the week when he still has not got one.

The film Hoffman could not direct

Dustin Hoffman optioned the book and set out to direct it himself as well as star in it. He got as far as shooting for a short period and then stopped, because doing both was not working, and brought in Ulu Grosbard — a theatre director he had worked with before — to finish it. Hoffman was reportedly unhappy with the film for years afterwards, which is a common enough postscript and, in this case, an odd one, because the picture contains his best work.

Max Dembo is a character with no charisma to spend. Hoffman had come off The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Lenny and All the President’s Men — a decade of parts that let the audience like him — and he plays Max with the likability surgically removed. Max is watchful, quiet, superficially reasonable, and completely uninterested in being understood. He is polite to people he is about to ruin. He is good at exactly one thing and it is the thing that puts him inside.

The performance’s greatest asset is its refusal to explain. There is no scene in which Max articulates why he goes back. There is no childhood. There is no speech. Hoffman lets you watch a man make a sequence of individually comprehensible decisions and arrive somewhere catastrophic, and never once signals that he knows where it is heading.

M. Emmet Walsh and the best villain of the 1970s

The antagonist of Straight Time is a civil servant. Earl Frank, played by M. Emmet Walsh, is Max’s parole officer, and Walsh’s performance is one of the great pieces of American character acting because it identifies something the genre almost never notices: petty power is more destructive than organised crime, and it does not know it is being cruel.

Earl is not corrupt. He does not take bribes or plant evidence. What he does is smaller. He calls Max “champ”. He shows up at Max’s room unannounced. He explains, patiently, that he is on Max’s side while doing the things that make Max’s life unworkable. He requires an employed man to attend an appointment during working hours. He confiscates the possibility of dignity in increments so small that objecting to any single one of them would look like an overreaction.

Walsh plays every scene as a man who believes he is helping. That is the horror. He is a bureaucrat with a caseload doing what the caseload requires, and the accumulated weight of his reasonable, well-intentioned, procedurally correct decisions does more damage to Max Dembo than any gangster in cinema, because it removes the possibility of the outcome the system claims to want.

The support, and the shape

Grosbard fills the rest with faces who will look like the 1970s forever. Harry Dean Stanton is Jerry Schue, a former partner now living in the suburbs with a wife, a lawn and a nagging inability to stay away. Gary Busey is Willy Darin, an addict whose usefulness is a fiction Max maintains for reasons he never examines. Theresa Russell, extremely young, plays Jenny Mercer, who works at an employment agency and takes an interest in Max for reasons the film treats as an open question rather than a romance. Kathy Bates appears briefly, years before anyone knew who she was.

Structurally, the film is a slope. Max wants to go straight, does the things required, and the film records with total patience the rate at which the required things become impossible. Then it lets him do a job, and the job is thrilling, and the thrill is the point — the picture has to make you feel why a man would go back, and it does, and the sequence is a small masterpiece of professional competence rendered as pleasure.

What it fathered

Michael Mann has cited Straight Time repeatedly, and the debt is legible all over Heat: the crew as a workplace, the ethic of having nothing you cannot walk away from in thirty seconds, the refusal to make robbery either glamorous or gothic. Mann took Bunker’s texture and gave it scale and a symphony. Grosbard’s version is the one with the parole office in it.

The other descendant is European. Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet makes the same argument from the other end of the sentence, showing an institution manufacturing the criminal it exists to contain. Put the two together and you have a complete circuit: prison builds the man, parole ensures he has nowhere to be but back.

The case against

The film is a downer with no formal ambition. Grosbard shoots it flat and functional; there is no style to admire and no sequence you would show a class for its cutting. The score, by David Shire, is discreet to the point of absence. The Jenny subplot asks a young woman to be attracted to a man whose only visible quality is danger, and the film’s honesty about that is thinner than its honesty about everything else.

It also flopped, in 1978, for entirely predictable reasons: it declines to be exciting for its first hour, its hero is unlovable, and its argument is that nothing can be done. Warner Bros. had no idea how to sell it and did not really try.

Where it sits

It has survived as a film-makers’ film, passed along by directors and by people who came to it through Bunker. It is the least romantic crime picture of the New Hollywood era and it has aged into something like a document.

Watch it for Walsh, who has never been better, and for Hoffman doing the bravest thing a movie star can do, which is to be uninteresting on purpose for two hours and make it grip.

Spoilers below

Two scenes finish Max, and only one of them is a crime.

The first is the freeway. Earl violates Max’s room, finds what he was always going to find, and puts him back inside on a technicality that Max did not earn — and when Max gets out again, he goes to Earl, handcuffs him to a chain-link fence beside a busy freeway, takes his trousers off, and leaves him there. It is the funniest scene in the film and the most disastrous. Max does not kill him. He humiliates him, in public, at length, in a way that can never be undone, and the humiliation is proportionate to what Earl has done and completely fatal to Max, because from that moment he is a fugitive and the straight life is arithmetically over. The film’s cruellest suggestion is that Max enjoyed it — that the calculation was made and the pleasure was worth the cost.

The second is the jewellery store. Max and Jerry Schue go in on a schedule: they know how long they have before the alarm brings a response, and Jerry has been told the number, and Jerry is the one with the lawn and the wife and the everything-to-lose. And Jerry will not leave. The time runs out and he is still filling his bag, still reaching for one more tray, and Max is at the door telling him to come and Jerry keeps grabbing, and the police arrive and shoot him down on the pavement outside. He is killed by greed measured in seconds. Grosbard shoots it with no music and no slow motion, in the flat afternoon light of a Los Angeles shopping street.

Max drives away. And the last movement is the one that stays with you: he goes to Jenny, and he says goodbye, and he does not take her, and he does not explain. Then he is alone in a car heading somewhere else, still free, still competent, with nothing ahead of him but the next job and the next sentence and the next Earl Frank.

There is no arrest and no redemption. Bunker’s title asks what is fiercer than a man who has been caged, and the film’s answer is that nothing about Max is fierce at all. He is simply a man who is good at one thing that nobody will let him stop doing, walking back into the only room where his skills have a use.