May 13 Harvey Keitel

For Harvey Keitel’s birthday I watched Thelma & Louise. Harvey plays an Arkansas police detective investigating a murder. He isn’t sure if Thelma (Gina Davis) or Louise (Susan Sarandon) killed the man, but they would have been witnesses. They evenly catch a drifter, Brad Pitt, that the girls gave a ride to OK City. Brad wouldn’t say anything and Harvey looked liked he wanted to beat him up. He tries to convince Brad to speak by hitting him with his own cowboy hat. Harvey says because Brad took their money they had to resort to armed robbery. So because of him the girls lost their chance. Harvey tries to get the girls to come back. They are headed to Mexico. Louise does not want to make any deals with the police and “don’t want to end up on the damned Geraldo show”. The police eventually trace a phone call and go after them. There is a scene where Louise is pulled over for speeding. Thelma pulls a gun on the office and locks him in the trunk. A man smoking weed (while riding a bicycle wearing a portable cassette player strapped to his arm) comes along and instead of rescuing him right away he blows smoke in one of the air holes in the trunk. The one thing that really bothered me was that from OKC they seemed to go the long way to Mexico. I understand taking the back routes, but it seems that they would have reached Mexico faster going through Texas.

The are caught at the Grand Canyon. As the girls drive off the cliff, Harvey starts to run after them. This is probably the most known scene of the film. I was kind of disappointed in the shots. I thought the shot should be of Harvey looking down at the wreckage, unbelieving what they had really done. On the DVD there was “extended ending”. It had more detailed ending. Where you followed the car a longer way down, you still didn’t see a crash, but you saw a helicopter follow down and Harvey looking down and then turn around and go back to the police. Ridley Scott thought this would be about Harvey and “would eclipse the girls“. The final shot of the extended ending is a single car driving in the desert. They also cut the original song “Better Not Look Down” by B.B. King. I like that deleted ending better. How do you cut B.B. King?

Since this is about Harvey, I thought that he had a good southern accent. He played the police detective as a concerned person not as a gung ho officer out for a capture.

As I was watching the police chase scenes I thought about Burt Reynolds. I have seen a few Burt Reynolds chase films for his birthday earlier this year. If you transposed this to a 1970’s Burt Reynolds film, Burt have lived, Harvey would have been killed in the chase Burt Reynolds always looked good, where the girls as they are referred to in the films were sun burnt, hair flying everywhere and dirty. Different times, different actors and different perspectives.