The Sting of Fact

By J.C.

MACON COUNTY LINE Directed by RICHARD COMPTON Screenplay by MAX BAER and RICHARD COMPTON

This is a beefy, low-budget thriller that provides a few surprises. The milieu is rural America in the 1950s, a place in recent history that has become crowded with avaricious time travelers since the success of American Graffiti. One of the protagonists (portrayed vigorously by Max Baer, who served as producer and helped with the scenario as well) is an atavistic sheriff, the sort of gun-toting good ol' boy who gives law enforcement down South a certain cave man cast. The sheriff represents just that sort of legalized mayhem that made Walking Tall such a big hit, and one might expect that Macon County Line would try to follow along in its prede cessor's misshapen footprints, combining the nostalgia of Graffiti with the violence of Walking Tall.

It turns out that the Graffiti-style period winsomeness is just a diversionary ploy and that County Line summons up echoes of Walking Tall only to refute them. The movie is an antidote to hortatory vigilantism. It preaches, with heat and compulsive honesty if not precisely with originality, that the fruit of hate is terrible, indiscriminate violence.

The sheriff is a man who has no pity to waste on strangers or blacks. He is kind to his son, and he would be a good father if only kindness mattered. He brings his boy up in his own image, however, more than he knows. The harrowing conclusion of the movie is a bloody, scary sequence in which, as the local idiom goes, all the chickens come home to roost. The sheriffs wife is slaughtered by a couple of frightened sneak thieves, and father and son go out for revenge.

Baer is careful to give the criminals an odd kind of motivation. The one who does the killing is a psychopath who had himself been brutalized by cops. When he realizes that the woman is a police man's wife, he goes crazy. The implication that violence breeds more violence is not novel, but welcome nonetheless in a time when audiences cheer and holler as Charles Bronson plays judge and jury with a pistol.

The movie, which is ragged but forceful, is said to be based on a true story. It sometimes seems much too pat in its converging ironies, but it is a credit to Baer and the deft action directing of Richard Compton that County Line at least assumes, in its strongest passages, the rueful sting of fact.

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