Franco Amurri’s ‘Flashback’ Is Deserving Of Reappraisal, For It Is Far More Than Just A ‘Midnight Run’ Knock-Off

While the end of the Sixties are largely remembered as the “Summer of Love,” they were more crucially a season of assassination. The Kennedy boys, Medgar Evars, Martin Luther King, Jr: what seemed like every progressive leader murdered even as the Manson Family, the dark epitome of a reviled “hippie” culture, took on the mantle of national bogeyman. Listen closely to Manson and find in his rants familiar rejections of social structures, our addiction to capitalism and the culture of fear that has made him a scapegoat for an entire decade of generational upheaval. He claimed from prison in a notorious interview with 60 Minutes that his jailors refused to let him shave and cut his hair, the better to undermine the images of the “free love” movement that the establishment was trying to undercut. Whether by conspiracy or circumstance – and let’s not forget the shadow of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway falling over Woodstock – revolutionary zeal was snuffed out and replaced by the paranoia of the Seventies. Progressive ideology and the courage to fight for the left died in the Sixties. The price for revolution became too high. Now, with Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and even the new season of Netflix’s Mindhunter taking its turn at knocking Manson down a few pegs, it seems the price of fear has finally become higher.

The dawn of the Eighties saw the election of our first Actor-in-Chief (and we should’ve learned our lesson the first time) and the concurrent rise of the Hollywood “blockbuster.” It’s marked by a series of superlative studio entertainments that, like Back to the Future‘s consideration of the hidden perversions of the sanctified Eisenhower years or Predator that presented the United States losing in another undeclared jungle war, looked to cast a light on the plastic-fantasia of Reagan’s national self-esteem campaign. At the end of the decade, Italian director Franco Amurri, fresh off filming La Grande (which Penny Marshall would later turn into Big), came to Hollywood for what amounted to a cup of coffee; he made two movies that didn’t do well before being more or less banished back to Italy for the rest of his years. The first of these two films, Flashback (1990) —currently streaming on both Hulu and Amazon Prime— is fascinating. Dennis Hopper, one of the icons of the short dream life of ’60s idealism, plays fictional counterculture hero Huey Walker infamous, and still wanted, for uncoupling Spiro Agnew’s train car during a whistlestop tour. Captured now in 1989 San Francisco, the FBI agent responsible for his transportation to trial is buttoned-up stick-in-the-mud John Buckner (Kiefer Sutherland), setting up a sort of Midnight Run road comedy mining humor from mismatched personalities.

The prologue to the film is a montage of Eighties consumerist excess: platinum credit cards, fast cars and health clubs, scored by Big Audio Dynamite, itself the easier-to-consume post-punk dance outfit comprised of one of the founding members of The Clash. The message of Flashback is that all of that hopeful noise in the ’60s was just another Boomer bedtime story. It proceeds along predictably, Hopper chewing scenery while Sutherland does his best functionary, but there are signposts along the way that there’s something on its mind beyond easy Odd Couple jokes. “The Sixties are over, Huey,” Buckner says. Then, after an uncomfortable bit involving a hooker on a train, Flashback goes gratifyingly off the rails. Walker escapes, Buckner gives chase, and they find themselves at an abandoned commune with last survivor Maggie (Carol Kane) where certain truths about the nature of freedom and all the potential good in the American character are revealed. It’s an emotionally true moment that runs counter to the film’s other revelations about the inability for the nation to shake off the stupor of its long nightmare. At about the one hour mark, Jefferson Airplane’s mournful “I Saw You” marks the shift into melancholy that drives the end of Flashback.

The Boomers may be full of shit, an aging generation that sold lies about the future as their stock and trade, but the message of the film is that there’s hope yet and time enough for the young to find their voice and their courage. The true believers of Flashback are belligerent, red-cap wearing morons drowning their sorrows in backwater honkytonks or hermits in exile waiting for a new cause to champion. Late in the picture, an old Huey Walker speech on 8-track is broadcast in the middle of a town square, espousing the evils of a government you can’t trust and a system of oppression that most everyone’s bought into. He talks about the money and lives spent on endless wars, the usurpation of the process by the 1% at the expense of the remaining 99, and it comes clear how far we had to go in 1990. The hope now is that sixty years after the Sixties, the light at the end of this black tunnel’s finally in sight. At the end of the film, Huey says to Buckner that rebellion is for the young. And he tells this young man we need him. We do.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Flashback (1990)