The Farmer 4K 1977

I recently watched The Farmer after it was, very briefly, posted on YouTube. I had been wanting to see the film since I read a negative review for it twenty some years ago. The print was rather poor, but beggars can't be choosy.

I have seen all six Death Wish movies, both Exterminator films, both Get Carter movies, plus about a dozen other revenge films. My favorites are Rolling Thunder and the original Get Carter, the ending of which The Farmer borrows (with admittedly a slightly different outcome). I like revenge movies, but The Farmer was just so-so.

The plot has Kyle Martin (Gary Conway), a Silver Star winning WWII veteran, returning from the war to find his family farm about to be auctioned. He needs money fast. The farmer's life changes after he rescues a gambler (Michael Dante) from a car wreck. The two men take a shine to each other. Later, when the gambler is blinded by the local (Atlanta?) criminal machine, the gambler offers the farmer a deal. He will give Martin enough money to save his farm if the farmer kills the goons.

The shootouts and revenge scenes were grim, bloody, and exciting, but those were almost all in the last half-hour. What wore me down was the first half of the movie with its arty montages of farm life as Gene Clark plays in the background. Plus, in spite of having four writers, the film did not do that good of job at setting things up. All the bonding time the farmer and the gambler apparently had to justify the latter calling on the former to become a hitman is not in the film. Also missing is all of the set-up for the romance between the farmer and the gangster's moll (the lovely Angel Thompkins), who seems all too happy to give up her fast life to chase chickens around a farmyard.

The filmmakers seem unsure of what kind of movie they are making. The Gene Clark songs and much of the opening suggests a period rural drama. It is also a gangster film and, at the end, a revenge film. Its odd structure reminds me a little of another film, Framed with Joe Don Baker, which begins as a movie about gamblers, becomes a prison flick, and also ends a revenge movie. However, the structure of Framed seems deliberate while The Farmer feels a bit confused about what it wants to be.

Is The Farmer worth watching? Yes, providing one has reasonable expectations. However, had the film been released on VHS tape by Columbia in the early 1980's, I don't think its cult would have been as strong. Had I saw The Farmer as a young man, around the same time I saw Young Warriors (a revenge film I champion), I might have more nostalgia for it, but I think I still would have preferred Young Warriors. Regardless, The Farmer has come a little late in my film viewing life for it to stand out.