Cutter's Way 4K 1981

This film is not only the tragic story of two friends, but also a vivid illustration of what a person who has experienced the horrors of war can sometimes become.

A huge chunk of bitterness settles in the heart of war veteran Alex Cutter, who—it feels as though—lost not only the left side of his body in the war, but also his humanity: when his best friend, played as always by the ever-pacifist Jeff Bridges, tells him that he saw someone who looked like a local billionaire disposing of a young woman’s body in an alley at night by dumping it in a dumpster, he—knowing that the rich man will surely never be caught—decides to punish the killer himself.

There’s no choice in the methods: Cutter has no intention of killing anyone, but putting a powerful oil tycoon behind bars—that’s an opportunity John Heard’s character can’t pass up. However, what is intriguing is not so much the blackmail scheme he concocts as irrefutable proof of the suspect’s guilt, but rather the situation itself, in which the true witness to the crime remains utterly indifferent to what is happening, while the blackmailer, relying solely on others’ words, makes nothing short of frantic attempts to achieve his goal.

The contrast between the two friends’ characters in the film is so obvious that it immediately becomes clear—the plot twist here is merely a pretext for action, nothing more than an attempt to take revenge on society as a whole through the billionaire, whom Katter apparently blames for his disability. In other words, the strong impression is created that if Katter hadn’t gone to that damned war, or at least returned physically unharmed, then the story of the street prostitute’s murder would have passed him by—it wouldn’t have interested him in the slightest. But when there is hell inside and you want to scream, scratch, and gnash your teeth—there will always be an enemy: it doesn’t really matter who you fight—the main thing is to fight.