After having heard about how great MACON COUNTY LINE is and how it's one of the undisputed classics of the 1970's drive-in/"hicksploitation" genre, I finally saw it for myself and was quite surprised by a few things. When taken at face value, MACON COUNTY LINE reads like a tense, suspenseful cautionary tale about being in absolutely the wrong place at absolutely the wrong time, but the actual film comes up lacking for a number of reasons:
1. The movie clocks in at 88 minutes and the actual conflict between the sheriff and the innocent travelers doesn't actually occur until roughly the last twenty minutes, by which time I had checked my watch more than once. And when it finally does go down, there's no chase since the trio's car has broken down; the trio holes up in an empty houseboat, so they're stuck there waiting for the sheriff to pick them off.
2. There were several times when I found myself wondering if the movie even had an editor; during the film's 88 minutes, much of the running time is spent on endless sequences meant to drive home a feeling of local color but those segments just drag on interminably, and the attempts at humor simply lay there like a dead raccoon. Except for the bit with the barking whore.
3. The heroes' mischievous nature is meant to be endearing, but their boorish and potentially dangerous behavior toward others was off-putting. The only reason I sympathized with them at all during the sheriff's crazed meltdown was because I knew they were innocent of the crime, and while they deserved some sort of comeuppance for their earlier transgressions, they certainly didn't warrant cold-blooded execution at the hands of Jethro Beaudine.
4. The wholly gratuitous sex scene between Chris and Jenny brings the movie to a complete halt and does nothing whatsoever to advance the plot, offering a small helping of the nudity that was more or less mandatory for exploitation fare of the period. You simply will not care when the sequence begins, and may even fast-forward through it like I did.
5. While we come to know and like the Dixon brothers as a kind of lower-rent Duke Boys (only minus the bows-and-arrows and the General Lee), Jenny is a cipher of a character who's there only so there can be a female among the heroes, and a female that you just know will eventually get naked for reasons previously discussed. I found her utterly superfluous to the story and genuinely feel the film would have benefited immensely from her total non-inclusion; the only suspense that Jenny's presence could have generated would have been the possibility of her getting raped by the crazed sheriff, but while he was crazed over the death of his wife, he wasn't that crazy. That particular female element in hicksploitation would later be famously immortalized in the far superior JACKSON COUNTY JAIL (1976).
But while I found MACON COUNTY LINE to be a vastly overrated disappointment, I was intrigued by Max Baer, Jr's portrayal of Sheriff Morgan. In sequences not dealing with his harassment of the innocent trio, Morgan is seen as a devoted family man who has a friendly rapport with the citizens of his town, and longs for nothing more than to spend quality time with his son. Far from the psycho cop he's often described as, Morgan is all too understandably human, control freak flaws and all, and I found it impossible to hate the guy, even when it's revealed that he'd rather his son not associate with the black kids who play basketball across the street from the military school; Morgan's racism comes across not as the stereotypical burning hatred usually found in a southern-fried exploitation flick, but rather as the result of being a product of his time, culture, and the accepted status quo. His explanation of his views on the subject to his son is more segregationist than flagrant "lynch them g-damned n****rs" bigotry, and considering the tropes common to this genre that comes as a surprise since exploitation filmmakers certainly never had any problem with creating outright, mustache-twirling villains of the vilest order; the quintessential example of a balls-out psychotic racist asshole villain would undoubtedly be William Sanderson's incredible Jesse Lee Kane in FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE (1977), and when compared to him Sheriff Morgan is certainly no villain. A hardassed control freak driven to violence by irrational grief, yes, but a villain per se? I don't think so.
There's been a lot of misleading stuff written about MACON COUNTY LINE over the years that paints the film as considerably more than it is, and as a curious student of the grindhouse/drive-in genre you may be intrigued by its rep, but bear in mind that much of its legend may be heavily colored by fond nostalgia, and that's why the ready availability of such oft-cited "classics" on DVD can be the genre's own worst enemy. If truth be told, seeing is definitely not always believing.
1. The movie clocks in at 88 minutes and the actual conflict between the sheriff and the innocent travelers doesn't actually occur until roughly the last twenty minutes, by which time I had checked my watch more than once. And when it finally does go down, there's no chase since the trio's car has broken down; the trio holes up in an empty houseboat, so they're stuck there waiting for the sheriff to pick them off.
2. There were several times when I found myself wondering if the movie even had an editor; during the film's 88 minutes, much of the running time is spent on endless sequences meant to drive home a feeling of local color but those segments just drag on interminably, and the attempts at humor simply lay there like a dead raccoon. Except for the bit with the barking whore.
3. The heroes' mischievous nature is meant to be endearing, but their boorish and potentially dangerous behavior toward others was off-putting. The only reason I sympathized with them at all during the sheriff's crazed meltdown was because I knew they were innocent of the crime, and while they deserved some sort of comeuppance for their earlier transgressions, they certainly didn't warrant cold-blooded execution at the hands of Jethro Beaudine.
4. The wholly gratuitous sex scene between Chris and Jenny brings the movie to a complete halt and does nothing whatsoever to advance the plot, offering a small helping of the nudity that was more or less mandatory for exploitation fare of the period. You simply will not care when the sequence begins, and may even fast-forward through it like I did.
5. While we come to know and like the Dixon brothers as a kind of lower-rent Duke Boys (only minus the bows-and-arrows and the General Lee), Jenny is a cipher of a character who's there only so there can be a female among the heroes, and a female that you just know will eventually get naked for reasons previously discussed. I found her utterly superfluous to the story and genuinely feel the film would have benefited immensely from her total non-inclusion; the only suspense that Jenny's presence could have generated would have been the possibility of her getting raped by the crazed sheriff, but while he was crazed over the death of his wife, he wasn't that crazy. That particular female element in hicksploitation would later be famously immortalized in the far superior JACKSON COUNTY JAIL (1976).
But while I found MACON COUNTY LINE to be a vastly overrated disappointment, I was intrigued by Max Baer, Jr's portrayal of Sheriff Morgan. In sequences not dealing with his harassment of the innocent trio, Morgan is seen as a devoted family man who has a friendly rapport with the citizens of his town, and longs for nothing more than to spend quality time with his son. Far from the psycho cop he's often described as, Morgan is all too understandably human, control freak flaws and all, and I found it impossible to hate the guy, even when it's revealed that he'd rather his son not associate with the black kids who play basketball across the street from the military school; Morgan's racism comes across not as the stereotypical burning hatred usually found in a southern-fried exploitation flick, but rather as the result of being a product of his time, culture, and the accepted status quo. His explanation of his views on the subject to his son is more segregationist than flagrant "lynch them g-damned n****rs" bigotry, and considering the tropes common to this genre that comes as a surprise since exploitation filmmakers certainly never had any problem with creating outright, mustache-twirling villains of the vilest order; the quintessential example of a balls-out psychotic racist asshole villain would undoubtedly be William Sanderson's incredible Jesse Lee Kane in FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE (1977), and when compared to him Sheriff Morgan is certainly no villain. A hardassed control freak driven to violence by irrational grief, yes, but a villain per se? I don't think so.
There's been a lot of misleading stuff written about MACON COUNTY LINE over the years that paints the film as considerably more than it is, and as a curious student of the grindhouse/drive-in genre you may be intrigued by its rep, but bear in mind that much of its legend may be heavily colored by fond nostalgia, and that's why the ready availability of such oft-cited "classics" on DVD can be the genre's own worst enemy. If truth be told, seeing is definitely not always believing.