The Farmer (1977).
Directed by David Berlatsky
Written by John Carmody, Janice Eymann, and George Fargo
Starring Gary Conway, Angel Tompkins, Michael Dante, and Ken Renard
“I don’t get mad…I get even.”
The Stage.
Kyle Martin returns from World War II determined to get his farm back up and running. Unfortunately, the bank is ready to repossess it. When a gambler offers to pay Kyle $50,000 to kill the gangsters that blinded him, he originally declines…until the gangsters make things personal.
The Review.
I’d heard a ton of hype about The Farmer because on some Blu-ray sites I frequent, this was continuously brought up in conversations about the best films that hadn’t yet been brought to disc. Hell, as far as I can tell, it was never even released on VHS. After its original run as either The Farmer or Blazing Revenge, it simply disappeared from the public eye. It was written by a trio that really hasn’t written anything since and was directed by a long time editor named David Berlatsky who never directed a film again. After what I assume were years full of legal battles, seeing as Bill from Code Red had advertised a DVD as early as 2006 and had recently taken down a bootlegged VHS rip that was slapped up on YouTube with a copyright strike, Scorpion Releasing must have bought the rights from Cod Red and finally got The Farmer out to the masses.
We start with Kyle, in uniform, on a train with a bunch of other servicemen. When the train bartender refuses to serve a black soldier, Kyle raises an exception and there’s a brawl. Eventually they throw Kyle from the train and he walks his ass back to his farm in rural Georgia. When he gets there, we find out why he defended the man’s honor as his farmhand, named Gumshoe, is also African American. Only a short time later, Kyle finds himself mixed up in all kinds of malarky, including rescuing a degenerate gambler after he crashes on the farm, banging the gambler’s girlfriend, and finding himself on the wrong end of the mob, a position that costs Kyle dearly.
As a revenge story, the film is nothing we haven’t seen before. Gary Conway plays Kyle, a cigar-chomping, sunglass wearing no-nonsense soldier. The rest of the characters feel like cardboard cutouts of archetypes we’ve seen a million times. The camera work feels lifeless, the story moves - at least at first - at the speed of molasses, and the entire production just seems to lack zip. The film was advertised as being so violent that it barely escaped an X rating, but I was a little let down in that respect. When there are moments of violence, they’re pretty well done, giving us the red paint blood that so many 70’s movies were soaked with, but nothing really felt groundbreaking. There is one particularly effective headshot as Kyle puts a revolver to a guy’s lips and blows the back of his head out and another in which a guy gets blasted with a shotgun that slides him across the pavement which was probably my favorite kill in the flick. There’s a long, disturbing sexual assault scene that’s supposed to be impactful, but the relationship between the victim and the farmer wasn’t really fleshed out and the bizarre music choice definitely lessened the wallop that it was designed to have.
The End.
The real question with a film like The Farmer is, “was it worth the wait?” As someone who hadn’t seen the film and had only heard the hype around it, I think I did a pretty decent job of tempering my expectations. As a revenge film, The Farmer was alright, but films like Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder are easily better than this, and I admit that I’m a little confused why there’s so much fanfare around it. I suppose it’s just one of those deals where because the film was nearly impossible to find for all of these years, there was just some hazy mysticism built up around it. The saga surrounding the rights was probably more entertaining to me than the film was.
The Blu-ray looks pretty good, the picture scanned from the original negative. Disappointingly, there are no special features outside of a trailer.
