JACKSON COUNTY JAIL: Greetings From The Heart Of The American Nightmare

It’s amaz­ing what a smart film­maker could get away with at the drive-in.  As long as you deliv­ered the right amount of exploitable con­tent to keep the pro­duc­ers and the audi­ence happy, you could pur­sue what­ever themes and mes­sages you wanted.  Roger Corman was the best at pro­vid­ing this sort of free­dom to film­mak­ers — as long as they could obey budget/time con­straints — and the New World Pictures cat­a­log fea­tures many films with off­beat themes as a result.

One of the best New World pro­duc­tions in this vein — one of the best New World releases, period — is Jackson County Jail.  The script, smartly crafted by future Oscar win­ner Donald Stewart, com­bines the “wrongly accused fugi­tive on the run” story arche­type with Southern Discomfort and rape-revenge movie ele­ments into an unex­pect­edly sub­ver­sive stew.  Our audi­ence iden­ti­fi­ca­tion fig­ure is Dinah Hunter (Yvette Mimieux), an L.A. ad exec who is burnt out from a bad job and a manip­u­lative, phi­lan­der­ing boyfriend (Howard Hesseman).  She calls her for­mer boss in New York, gets her old job back and decides to drive cross coun­try to shake off the L.A. blues.

…And that’s where her trou­bles begin.  She gets fooled by a pair of grifters who steal her car and purse.  When she tries to get help in a small town, a drunken bar owner comes on to her and then turns her over to the cops when she fights him off.  She’s put in jail while they check out her iden­tity because she has no i.d. to show — and when the sher­iff leaves, the overnight deputy rapes her.  She acci­den­tally kills him when she fights back and is talked into run­ning by the pris­oner in the next cell, career crim­i­nal Coley Blake (Tommy Lee Jones).  They run for free­dom but the road grows more per­ilous by the moment as the cops close in.

Simply put, Jackson County Jail is a fas­ci­nat­ing col­li­sion of exploita­tion savvy with message-oriented film­mak­ing.  All the key exploita­tive ele­ments are in place — action, a bit of nudity and plenty of chases, punch-ups and shootouts — but the frame­work used to deliver them works in some chal­leng­ing ideas.

To start with, the film is openly crit­i­cal of America and its insti­tu­tions.  As seen through the main character’s eyes, the coun­try is a place where men hold the power and are resent­ful of inde­pen­dent women.  The police are por­trayed as inef­fec­tual, hasty in judg­ment and some­times cor­rupt.  It’s not just the author­ity fig­ures, either.  Corruption extends all the way down to the society’s under­belly: for every “hon­est” crook like Coley, there are two amoral preda­tors like the hitch­hik­ers that rob Dinah.  The cyn­i­cal view­point of the film is best summed up in an unfor­get­table speech where Coley describes the coun­try as one big “rip-off.”

Jackson County Jail is also unusu­ally per­cep­tive in how it por­trays the rape scene that the plot turns upon.  This sequence and its slow buildup is played for drama and real­ism rather than tit­il­la­tion, con­vinc­ingly por­tray­ing how this kind of sce­nario could hap­pen and show­ing the true ugli­ness of the act (in an inspired touch, the rapist with­draws in self-disgust when the enor­mity of what he has done hits him).  Its unique to see this kind of moment han­dled with such sen­si­tiv­ity and dra­matic detail in an exploita­tion film.

The inter­est in drama fur­ther extends to the rela­tion­ship between Dinah and Coley.  Any other ver­sion of this story would try to trans­form the two into star­crossed lovers but Jackson County Jail shows admirable restraint.  The two char­ac­ters grow on each other slowly but are too belea­guered and dif­fer­ent as peo­ple to fall in love.  Instead, we see them bridge the gap between them­selves by first dis­cussing their dif­fer­ences and then begin­ning to appre­ci­ate their key sim­i­lar­i­ties — a sense of hon­esty and a basic inner decency.  This hap­pens dur­ing a sort of inter­mis­sion where the two hole up in a deserted house and catch their breath: this seg­ment is eas­ily the best writ­ten and directed mate­r­ial in the film and almost plays like an art­house drama.

These touches make Jackson County Jail more than your aver­age exploita­tion flick.  The final ele­ment is strong crafts­man­ship on both sides of the cam­era.  The act­ing is truly above-average for this kind of film.  Mimieux han­dles her chal­leng­ing role with grace and sub­tlety, han­dling Dinah’s more emo­tional moments with impres­sive real­ism, while Jones’ uses his down-home charisma to flesh out his character’s world-weariness and dark out­look on life.  Robert Carradine is also con­vinc­ingly scary in an early role as the leader of the hitch­hik­ing duo, as is Frederic Cook as the jail­house rapist: nei­ther over­plays and their nat­u­ral­is­tic work makes them all the more effective.

Behind the cam­era, Stewart’s script has a tight nar­ra­tive and deliv­ers the required action but has a thought­ful­ness to its pre­sen­ta­tion of char­ac­ter and the­matic mate­r­ial.  The same com­ment could be extended to Michael Miller’s direc­tion, which bypasses the relent­lessly aggres­sive style you’d expect from this kind of film.  There are a few mis­steps — namely, a car crash that hap­pens too eas­ily and is too explo­sive — but he has a real eye for com­po­si­tion (look at the gor­geous way the scenes with Mimieux and Jones are shot) and a flair for ironic visual jux­ta­po­si­tions,  the lat­ter really com­ing into play dur­ing the down­beat finale.

In short, if you’re a 1970’s exploita­tion scholar then Jackson County Jail is required view­ing.  It took a lot of nerve to make a movie this crit­i­cal of America and its prob­lems dur­ing the Bicentennial — then again, it’s also the kind of won­der­ful sur­prise that New World Pictures was capa­ble of when it was fir­ing on all cylinders.

Jackson County Jail / Caged Heat [Double Feature] Jackson County Jail: A young woman trav­el­ing cross coun­try finds her­self stranded in a remote town after two psy­chotic hitch­hik­ers steal her car. She seeks refuge in a local bar and is thrown overnight in jail where things only get worse. Caged Heat: Traditional sex-and-violence for­mula of babes behind bars, gra­tu­itous nudity and a cor­rupt prison sys­tem trans­formed into rebel burst of girl power! Director Jonathan Demme’s first film.