The Hard Road (USA, 1970) 85 min color DIR: Gary Graver, Greg Corarito. PROD: Ed De Priest. SCR: Richard Stetson. MUSIC: Jaime Mendoza-Nava. DOP-EDITOR: Gary Graver. CAST: Connie Nelson, John Alderman, Catherine Howard, Gary Kent, Liz Renay, Ray Merritt, William Bonner, Bruce Kimball.
Now here’s a real find: a 70s exploitation movie taking its cue from the hokey classroom films that its target audience would have watched a few years earlier. Who says drive-in movies weren’t educational?
The Hard Road is an exploitation catalogue of sex, drugs and violence. On its own, this is quite a gripping movie. The bizarre inclusion of the “educational” footage makes the film even more unique for its time, whether or not in a good way. Thusly, The Hard Road is by turns hilarious, sordid, ridiculous and depressing.
Pretty teenager Pam (Connie Nelson), living in a posh suburban bungalow, is the scourge of the family once she has a baby out of wedlock. She gives up the infant, and with the help of her father, tries to get her life back on track. But as any viewer of exploitation knows, that isn’t gonna happen! Her dad gets her a job as a secretary for his friend Leo (veteran stuntman and screen heavy Gary Kent!), who is a talent agent. We soon learn that this guy is a sleaze with a one-way mirror in his office to spy on young women in stages of undress.
She hooks up with one of Leo’s clients, Steve (Roger Everett), a rock star who beds her at a party. Slowly but certainly, Pam gets more involved in the drug scene, especially in her friendship with Jeannie (Catherine Howard), who share many screen moments popping bennies. Jeannie’s friend Jimmy (John Alderman) is a hippie layabout who starts getting into heroin.
Cue the square voiceover which reminds us that what we’re seeing is supposed to be educational. A slurry narrator warns us: “Every year there are thousands from overdoses of barbiturates. It is very easy to lose count.” The film takes an even more bizarre turn right when Pam’s mother finds a note that her daughter has contracted VD. A voiceover explains Pam’s procedure to get treated for venereal disease as the viewer watches clinical gynecological diagrams and stills. There’s even a doctor with horn-rimmed glasses talking to the camera!
The Hard Road just gets harder after that. Jimmy forces Pam to turn tricks to support his heroin habit, but she runs away, and the law catches up to Jimmy. In one harrowing scene, he flips out in jail overnight. And Pam’s downward spiral still continues.
It is difficult to make out what the filmmakers had in mind with its hilarious clichés, unsettling documentary-like examination of counterculture, offensive depiction of homosexuals, and above all, an educational film so out of its own time. The hippies are such an exaggeration of stereotypes, one could mistakenly think this came from a major studio. (Sample dialogue: “ Guess I OD’d” “Far out.”)
The film also has one of the most desperate LSD trip sequences in memory. When Pam takes some acid (with the hard-working narration, “…not much, but given her current state of mind with stress…”), the film makes much of its few psychedelic images: extreme closeups of Pam’s flickering eyelids, infrared footage of her running through a forest and a stadium, endlessly repeated shots of an airplane flying overhead, and a long-sleeved white shirt falling down in front of a dark background.
Naturally, the picture exposes the hypocrisy in Pam’s shamed parents, who shun their kid’s smoking dope when they drink booze like water. Liz Renay, one-time future Marilyn, steals the film in her few scenes as Pam’s brassy mom. Her over-the-top performance, yelling, drinking, slapping, takes syrupy melodrama to the nth degree.
However, the technical ineptitude can be forgiven in its unflinching account of the countercultural downside. With its shaky lighting inside a VW Microbus, and male voice on a loud speaker in an-all female VD clinic, its shoddiness somehow captures the sordid lifestyle of its subjects. The scenes of some guy tripping out in a tunnel, Pam teetering over a highway bridge in an attempt to kill herself, or Jimmy freaking out in a tank at the police station, is enough to make anyone stay off drugs.
And finally, at the film’s conclusion the same nameless doctor pops up at a roadside, and addresses the camera with the aphorism, “There’s a thin line between life and death.” Yes, and to that, there is also a thin line between art and trash. For every artfully composed moment like Pam staring in a department store window, there is another like Steve’s POV while he is making love to Pam. The film’s co-director (with Greg Corarito, who is also the man on camera breaking the fourth wall), editor and cinematographer, Gary Graver has created a movie that is as sordid as anything by his frequent employer, Al Adamson. Whatever its intentions, The Hard Road is a memorable, unsettling experience all the same. Something Weird once released this to DVD, paired with Sid Davis’ feature-length Damaged Goods, another film that appeared out of its time.