What made 1970s American cinema so remarkable? With the cinematic experience now in seemingly terminal decline, the 70s are unlikely to be beaten. So, when cinema was at its peak, what was it that got it truly humming?

One explanation is that acting had never been better. The seeds sown by Method actors Marlon Brando, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Montgomery Clift, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Shelley Winters, and Joanne Woodward were in full bloom by the early 70s. A relaxation – a coaxing of the camera to come to them, rather than yielding to the lens – and a fearlessness meant writers finally had suitable avatars who could reach emotional summits previously in the clouds.

The political environment mattered, too. Institutional distrust and polarisation make for good art. Just as cynical returned soldiers filled the dramatis personae of film noir, a cynical film student – driven by futile wars, racial injustice, and disgraced presidents – created works that refused to deny the mess we were all in. The establishment, from the halls of power to your local community, represented the true scoundrels, and of course, the house always wins.

The ambiguity and often open endings of many of these films were a visceral charge for me as a young film watcher. Were the hero to die at the end, I’d melt into the final image of the *mind-blown Vince McMahon meme. I was at an age where I sought chaos. I increasingly saw safe, slickly-packaged redemptive arcs as part of the conspiracy – a lie told by wider society to limit my questioning. I liked questions, far more, I have since learned, than answers, and this was 70s cinema – diagnosis, without any subsequent treatment.

The ambiguous narrative so prevalent back then is also far more interactive. Novelistic. You are building the story along with the screenwriter and director, colouring in what is left bare with a pastel of your choice. The ambiguous film tends to live in you far longer, too. Weeks later, you can still be wrestling with a question posed, and repeat screenings can feel like wholly different movies, leading to radically different interpretations. But it can go wrong. Very wrong. I handed in a script as a young screenwriter and received a golden note that forever changed my writing. “Ambiguity isn’t simply vagueness. You are walking us right up to a door, but not opening it. Right now, we’re not at the door. We’re not on the property. We’re not even on the same fucking street!” The point was taken. Give absolutely everything, but that thing.

You have to work harder, in other words. A film I co-wrote and starred in, The Waiting Place (2001), is a good example of this. The holes in the story were explained away as Tarkovsky-esque invitations to muse wider philosophical questions by the writer-director, but the truth was he had only managed a 15-page script. My additions were vital for a semblance of shape, which the proud director then tried to exorcise in the edit room. I got a sense at the time that the director thought murky felt more adult. But murky is not the same as ambiguity, not in the cinematic sense anyway. You’re crafting a crossroads with clear directions for viewers to walk down. You are, as my early mentor put it so well, leading one to the door and placing the key in their hands. It is on them to unlock it.

So, what goes wrong with Race with the Devil (1975), a Warren Oates and Peter Fonda vehicle about a vehicle – a Winnebago Brave RV, the middle-class answer to the roller-skate in mid-70s America. Joined by the brassy Loretta Switt and Lara Parker (the wives of Oates and Fonda, respectively), the couple’s holiday across rural Texas only to witness a Satanic sacrifice. From that moment on, the road, the great American metaphor for freedom, becomes a narrowing corridor. The group is never truly escaping but being funnelled toward their doom. It’s pure exploitation cinema – a drive-in staple – that was never expected to trouble The Godfather II on its romp to Oscar glory. The long shadow of the Manson Murders looms over it, as does The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973). Devil worshipping is the horror, though this aspect is barely explored outside of the early scene of the murder the group stumbles upon. For most of the film, we’re hanging with Oates and Fonda, Swit and Parker in the state-of-the-art RV, and I have to say, kicking back with Warren Oates in an RV was one of the more satisfying parts of the experience.

Oates, tragically underused in my opinion, showed us in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) that he could’ve been the Bogart of the 70s, but here he’s an unspectacular owner of a motorcycle repair and sales business, comfortable enough to own an RV but too overworked to enjoy much of the spoils. Today, this character would work in advertising, or some sort of office – possibly recently passed over for a promotion (why is the cinematic world littered with characters passed over for promotion? A reflection of the cutthroat studio system rather than everyday life?). The set-up invites us inside a very real middle-class world, of good, uncomplicated men with good, uncomplicated marriages. They’d be an argument for swapping out Fonda for a Ronny Cox, or his Deliverance cast- member Ned Beatty to dig even deeper into middle-class ordinariness, but we get to see Fonda ride (a pair of dirtbikes are strapped to the back of the RV), only 6 years post the groundbreaking Easy Rider (1969). He’s more than serviceable, however, and has great buddy chemistry with Oates.

Race with the Devil was based on an original screenplay - reverse-engineered, I’d say - from a killer hook. You can feel it in the construction: everything is in service of momentum. Chase, suspicion, escalation. The film was made quickly, cheaply – for about $1.7 million – with one of the writers, Lee Frost, as initial director, only to be replaced by actor-turned-director Jack Starlett (personnel switches are not uncommon for cheapies). The film never required an auteur, but the directorial equivalent of Warren Oates invoice-shuffling character – someone to keep the engine running. The location is Texas where, in a post-Leatherface world, a sweltering noon is more dread-inducing than a pitch-black churchyard. Fly-blown gas stations. Toothless attendants. You know the terrain.

And for a while, it works beautifully. The early sacrifice scene is genuinely eerie. The cultists are young. And naked. Drugged-out hippies, concludes local Sheriff played by R.G. Armstrong. But, as the film unfolds, the storytellers’ control slips. The cult expands, but instead of becoming more frightening, it becomes less coherent. By the final act, the faces surrounding the protagonists skew older, softer, almost banal. Shopkeepers, mechanics, authority figures, overweight, middle-aged rednecks. Everybody. As for the young, nubile women we encountered at the start, and the ominous leader, in the striking pagan mask? We never see them again. Our villains start as a Russ Meyers ensemble but transform into the cast of Cocoon.

You can see the intention. The horror is everywhere. But the transition from youthful cultists to what feels like a retirement-home network doesn’t deepen the dread - it diffuses it, possibly because we don’t ever get to know the cult, or the rules of their game. The threat becomes abstract in the wrong way. There is no thematic tie-in to justify any of it, let alone to explain why the average age of the cult members increases dramatically.

And part of that, I suspect, is production reality bleeding into the celluloid. This is a low-budget film shot on location with whatever extras were likely available - local performers, and a fist-tight schedule. You don’t always get to perfectly match your conceptual vision with your casting pool. What might have been intended as a cross-generational conspiracy - young initiates, older organisers - lands instead as inconsistency. The ambiguity starts to feel less like design and more like a reflection of production limitations.

But the writing, too, must take some blame. Ambiguity only works when what you see is compelling enough to replace what you’re not being told. If paranoia is the engine, then the film ought to have forced its characters into the consequences of misreading the world: to suspect the innocent, to act on that suspicion, perhaps even to do irreversible harm. Why not have a gorgeous young cult member reemerge as the Apple Pie daughter of the Sheriff? The generations are never linked, after all. Maybe she is interrogated by Fonda or Oates, her denials leaving them doubting their own sanity? Instead, their fear is largely confirmed rather than tested, and the film settles for external threat over internal collapse, which is where the cinema of paranoia lives. They also stick around the town, quite inexplicably, considering they are under direct threat (a note is left on their RV saying as much). A problem with the RV, possibly fudged by a cultist mechanic, would’ve handled this. OK, we’ve seen that plenty of times before, but as it stands, they remain by choice. The result is a suspicion that hovers but never tightens - a nightmare glimpsed but never fully inhabited.

And yet, despite this, the film holds well enough. And that has everything to do with Oates and Fonda, and Swit and Parker, and some truly riveting action, including a fantastic closing chase featuring the now worse-for-wear Winnebago that offers up a buffet of crushed steel.

I would watch it again, in about 5 years or so, not for the ultimately weak-sauce Satanists, but because I love, love, LOVE that someone made a Warren Oates RV movie. Cinema’s everyman in the everyman’s go-to expensive toy. It also reminds me of a Warren Oates story shared with me by director Roger Donaldson, who worked with Oates on his debut feature, and the classic NZ film Sleeping Dogs (1977). Donaldson (somewhat naively) sought Jack Nicholson for the small role of Commander Smith, a senior figure in the authoritarian regime that’s taken hold of New Zealand. The $5000 on offer wasn’t going to secure Jack, but the agent on the other end of the phone knew an actor who would likely take the role if a fly-fishing trip was also on offer. The deal was done, and Warren Oates came down, smoked pot with Sam Neil, carried his script on a clipboard so he could refer to it in scenes (look out for it in the finished film), before being whisked away to Turangi in an RV. According to production manager Graeme McClean (who accompanied Oates on the trip), the pair became fast friends, and after Oates died prematurely in 1982, his widow and son relocated to New Zealand for a short time. A very curious tale that I had hoped to confirm with Oates’ son, whom I found on Facebook, but, alas, young Mr. Oates never replied.

I wonder if, on Race with the Devil, Oates had a similar production rider?

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