Mock Heroics

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

OUTLAW BLUES

Directed by Richard T. Heffron

Screenplay by B. W. L. Norton

In spirit, Outlaw Blues is like a lot of country music. It is a mock-heroic ballad, loose and unpretentious in form, good-natured, yet somehow not quite so memorable as it might have been.

It is the story of Bobby, a jailbird composer (Peter Fonda), whose best song is stolen and recorded by a country-and-western star who hears the piece when he drops in on the pen to cut a concert record (as many such singers do) in an authentic environment. Paroled, Fonda sets out to claim credit and royalties for his creation, and is falsely accused of wounding the thief in a scuffle over the matter. He then falls in with Tina (Susan Saint James), who has learned most of the music business's sharper angles as an underpaid back-up singer and who dreams up a neatly ironic scheme to get Fonda his due.

His attack on the star has made him a wanted man, but it has also made him a minor celebrity, since a television news team happened to be on the scene when the fight occurred. Moreover, his prison record gives him--in the C. and W. world anyway--a suitably romantic aura. Tina arranges for him to do the things that any pop singer does to promote a record -- tours, disc-jockey interviews. But before each appearance, she tips off the cops, timing the call so that they arrive too late to catch Bobby but in plenty of time to allow for a colorful comic chase. Naturally, the public rallies to him as a sort of Robin Hood figure. The film offers a glancing insight into a curious phenomenon of our time, namely, when the law's remedies for injustice fail, celebrity can be a powerful defense for the few individuals lucky enough to command it.

This is not to imply that the movie lingers long on this -- or any other -- point.

It just keeps bouncing amiably along, with Fonda at his most ingratiating, Saint James giving a performance that nicely balances Tina's strong drives toward both greed and love. Director Heffron (or his second-unit man) does not stage the several chase scenes as tightly as he might, and Writer Norton sketches scenes that could have been more fully developed comically and emotionally. They don't attempt to do for Austin, Texas -- center of so-called outlaw country music -- what Robert Altman did for Nashville. Still, Outlaw Blues is a pleasant, modest entertainment, which, like several other recent films, demonstrates that the only cops we can still afford to kid in the grand old American tradition are small town and rural. There is just nothing funny any more about law enforcement in big cities.

--Richard Schickel

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