Get Me Out of Here: Harry Dean Stanton in Straight Time

This is confirmed when Carol exits to the kitchen, to bring the men some beers. Jerry then makes it unmistakable that he’s been putting on an act for her, and possibly for himself. Between wolfish bites of burger that prefigure his impatience with every kind of delay, he lowers his vocal register and says to Max, “Get me out of here. They’re killing me. I can’t make this scene anymore. Get me out of here.” The lines are the film’s hinge; as Jerry’s mask falls instantly away, Max seems only halfway surprised. Jerry goes on swallowing barely chewed chunks of burger and adds, “You got somethin’, I know you got somethin’.” What Jerry means is a gig, a heist, a target for robbery, anything that will make him feel less dead inside.

Max: “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

Jerry: “I don’t give a damn what it is, let’s just do it.”

When Carol returns, it is with two beers but also with Jerry’s acoustic guitar, which she places in his hands. Possibly she sees his music as a sufficient container for his discontent. At first Jerry balks, embarrassed, but Max beckons to him: “What’s that walkin’ stick thing you used to play?”

“Walking stick? You mean ‘Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane?’”

Max: “Yeah, play that. C’mon, we got cause to celebrate.” An allusion lost on Carol. What Max and Jerry are now celebrating is a fresh partnership, one that will embolden an escalating series of robberies and eventually lead to Jerry’s death and Max shooting a policeman, murdering another accomplice, and being locked up again, presumably for good.

With smiles at first sheepish, then increasingly candid, Jerry sings: “Hand me down, my walking cane / Hand me down my walkin’ cane / Hand me down my walkin’ cane / I’m gonna leave this ball and chain.” The last line sounds good enough to him that his face splits in a real grin. Carol, the ball-and-chain in question, bobs her head encouragingly, not hearing the meaning of the song. Grosbard’s camera rises up, in the kind of crane shot traditionally used to end a film; in fact, this marks the end of the first half of Straight Time. Only as the frame widens do we see how closely this backyard is bounded by the high fence on all sides. Jerry has found his own captivity in the opposite sense that Max soon will, not by failing to achieve “straight time” but by achieving it too well; for him, the suburban monogamy, the pool and grilled burgers, all is as much a prison as anything he experienced on the inside.

Their very first job, the robbery of a high-stakes poker game, goes so wrong that the ostensible victims never even learn that their game has been cased. Max’s other confederate, who is meant to supply the weaponry, is a jelly-legged amateur, who not only arrives late but without the promised firepower. (In a film of brilliantly overlapping motifs and set pieces, this foreshadows Gary Busey’s cataclysmic failure as the getaway driver.) Jerry’s disappointment as the plan sours is a knife in the gut: he dropped out of suburbia, out of poolside burgers and beers, for this? Jerry expends his bitterness in a seething rant. “Man, this is very unprofessional . . . Goddamn it, I told you, I’m not taking that game without a shotgun. You can’t cover a fucking poker game without a shotgun, all right? The plan was to meet your friend with the shotgun we go in and do the job and we leave. We been sittin’ here all fucking night waiting for the guy with the shotgun and you want to take it with your cap pistol and I’m telling you it’s very unfuckingprofessional, all right?” Stanton’s exasperated emphasis on fucking and shotgun gives the speech an incantatory and prophetic power. At this moment he feels he might be the only competent criminal on the planet. The younger men are all predestined to fail the standard of his teachings.

It’s not wrong to say that Jerry plays Max’s father figure, very much like Willie Nelson is to James Caan in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981). (Mann had an uncredited hand in Straight Time’s script, and the research he conducted, interviewing lifelong criminals, appears to have strongly influenced his own work as a director.) Nevertheless, Stanton also vividly defines the childlike jubilation that still explodes from inside the jaded criminal veteran. It’s the adrenaline of an armed robbery, as much as the money, that is his intoxicant. As we understood when he mock-humbly accepted the proffered guitar, Jerry is a performer, one who loves to play-act the “bad robber” to Max’s “good robber.” When they rob a bank, he terrifies the tellers and customers with feral glee: “You in love with me? Answer me, you in love with me? Then stop looking at me motherfucker, or I’ll blow your goddamn face off!” Max then has to console the tellers enough to get them back up to open their cash drawers.

Yet for all his apparent lucidity and expertise, Max has a radical criminal flaw: he always keeps their meticulously planned robberies going a couple of minutes too long, needing to grab extra cash or extra jewels, as though believing himself in possession of a magic watch that halts the flow of outside time. This snaps Jerry out of his happy place, and forces him to revert to hall monitor, with increasing desperation: “Time’s up, let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go!! Let’s hit it. LET’S GO!!” In this, Jerry also functions as an audience surrogate. Though Hoffman’s character remains the center of the story, once we’re equipped with Jerry’s view onto Max’s obsessional form of self-defeat, we see Max differently. We’re made to see that Jerry is the true keeper of the “time” in the film’s title. He knows what Max refuses to understand: that for the ex-cons and future-cons populating this film, it is not only the prospect of “going straight” that has failed them, but the winged chariot itself. For these men it was always already too late.