Enormous Radio

By Richard Schnickel

Handle With Care is the new title of a movie that had a short, unhappy life in the drive-ins last summer under the name Citizens Band, was discovered by a few members of the intellectual film community, successfully played at this year's New York Film Festival, and has now been rereleased. For once, the intelligentsia are right about an American genre film; this one is well worth serious consideration.

A "handle" in CB parlance is the name by which a broadcaster identifies himself on the air, and what the movie seems to be saying is that one should use some care in picking it. There is a tendency to act out, first in fantasy, then in reality, the sort of life suggested by one's handle. In effect, a CB rig offers a form of power to the powerless of our society, a way for them to make themselves heard in a world that does not pay them much heed. This is what has become of the Middle Americans who exercised such a powerful, if brief, hold on journalistic and political imaginations back in the Nixon era. They are no longer fomenting a counterrevolution; they are out there on the highways talking crazy to one another.

Handle With Care brings on a bunch of them, including a bigamous truck driver whose two wives discover his double life and join forces to, in effect, punish him with kindness; a horny youth and a seemingly respectable woman who use their rigs for mutually masturbatory conversations; a radio priest and a radio fascist who employ the air waves to peddle their doctrines. In the classic manner of exploitation pictures, the movie moves fast and speaks bluntly. It does not linger long over anyone's sense of anomie or alienation, but the panel-cartoon style i. effective. It is enough to be made aware of these empty lives.

This is especially true of the family whose story forms the core of the film. There is an old man (Roberts Blossom), a senile mumbler who springs to youthful life when he is gossiping with truckers; his caretaker son (Paul Le Mat) who sets himself up as a kind of CB vigilante, policing those who abuse CB privileges; an athletic-coach brother (Bruce McGill) who hates both of them and anonymously threatens vengeance on them; a schoolteacher (Candy Clark) who has had it off with both of them, but who turns out to be the aforementioned dirty talker and is sexually alive only when she's plugged into the Citizens Band.

There is in that tangle of confused emotions the stuff of tragedy, and the film's chief flaw is that it veers suddenly from the grim direction in which it seemed to be heading and brings all the CBers together in a reconciliatory effort to rescue the old man. The sequence is an obvious effort to regain the sympathy of the CB audience, showing them as socially useful citizens, but they--and everyone else--will have long since discerned the movie's true view of their world. The question is whether the rest of the world will care enough about this milieu to become good buddies with a curious and very original movie. -Richard Schickel

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