My World of Flops, Trigger Happy Case File #189 The Survivors (1983)
Welcome, friends, to the very first entry in Lovable Losers/Bad with Money Month here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, one of twelve themes voted on by YOU, the reader/patron, for 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin, one of my many ambitious, failed projects.
It’s taken me a year longer than I anticipated to do the twelve theme months but we are currently in our TENTH, yes tenth, non-blockbuster month so the end is in sight.
I am a big fan of Michael Ritchie but he’s one of the many iconoclastic auteurs who had a spectacular 1970s (Prime Cut, The Candidate, Smile, The Bad News Bears, Semi-Tough), only to stumble critically and creatively in the ensuing decades.
1983’s The Survivors’ reputation as an utter misfire scared me away from it. I also only really became a fan of Robin Williams’ broad comic performances after his death. But The Survivors sure looked like it fit the month’s theme snugly so I figured I would finally see for myself if The Survivors failed because it was too satirical or not satirical enough.
In the world of paranoid, gun-crazed survivalists convinced they’ll be forced to defend their homes at gunpoint from crazed inner city looters, The Survivors has a juicy satirical subject worthy of a classic 1970s Michael Ritchie comedy but is undone by the crudeness of its 1980s-style execution.
The sometimes oppressive zaniness begins with executive Donald Quinelle (Robin Williams) heading into work one unforgettable morning and getting fired by a parrot trained to deliver bad news to laid-off employees.
When the understandably distraught, now unemployed man asks the boss’ secretary to use the phone she pulls a gun on him and calls him an “ungrateful turd.”
I’m no prude. Heck, I’ve been known to use adult language myself. But there was something about the puerile nature of the film’s scatological humor that brought out the puritan in me.
There are a surprising amount of quotable lines in the screenplay from Michael Leeson, future adapter of War of the Roses, but there are also, in addition to the line about Donald being an ungrateful turd, dialogue about “smoking a turd” in hell, biting off a nose and sticking it up someone’s ass, a “dipshit” and a reference to “pee pee ca ca.”
That, friends, is just plain distasteful. I expect more of a man of Ritchie’s stature than to hear a lot of potty talk and gutter language that belongs in a trash can with all of the other garbage and not in a Hollywood motion picture starring top talent like Robin Williams and Walter Matthau.
Shame on you, Hollywood! It’s bad enough you’re ruled by an evil cabal of Satanic, child-eating pedophiles. For the movie industry to traffic in coarse language as well is unforgivable.
Ritchie certainly didn’t have to resort to rude language to make The Bad News Bears a timeless classic, although it has been a while since I’ve seen it.
The despondent businessman goes to a diner, where his path crosses that of the similarly luckless Sonny Paluso (Matthau, fine as always in a role beneath him), a Korean War veteran and divorced single father whose gas station goes up in flames due to Donald’s bumbling ineptitude.
Sonny and Donald aren’t the only ones struggling. Everybody is hurting economically, spiritually, morally and otherwise except for the very wealthy of course due to the savage iniquities of Reaganomics.
The recession has even affected lanky, drawling hitman Jack Locke (Jerry Reed), who is reduced to collecting unemployment because people just don’t have the money to hire a A-list contract killer like himself.
Jack attempts to rob a diner where our hard-luck heroes are eating but they succeed in stopping and unmasking him, although Donald is shot in the process while Sonny is identified by the gunman.
Sonny wants to go back to what’s left of his old life as quietly as possible and avoid getting murdered in the process but the formerly milquetoast former executive’s life is changed forever for the worst.
The unusually hairy lost man is utterly transfixed and transformed by his brush with death and danger. He becomes convinced that the world is hurtling madly towards oblivion and the only way not to be destroyed is to devote the entirety of your existence to the art of survival.
With a manic gleam in his eyes, Donald begins assembling an arsenal for both the armed skirmishes that will accompany the end times and to protect him when/if Jack comes calling on a mission of revenge.
The trigger-happy and increasingly paranoid and heavily armed beginner survivalist’s life unravels further when his fiancé leaves him rather than go along with his increasingly extreme views on life.
When Sonny, who desperately wants to take the hitman’s offer to leave them alone forever as long as they don’t identify him to the police shows up at the extremely for-profit survivalist camp where Donald’s worst fears and are being inflamed he shows them around and shoots through the boombox of a target representation of a cartoonish b-boy.
“Wes says ‘Shoot the radios. Because without music they lose half the will to fight” Donald tells his skeptical, hangdog pal of his guru and the camp’s director’s advice.
This makes it pretty damn apparent that the right-wing militia our “hero” has joined out of fear and a mad hunger for power is, like most right-wing militias, deeply racist and paranoid. It distressingly also makes it clear that Donald does not seem to have much of a problem with this element of the camp’s philosophy.
Granted, survivalists and survivalism are not depicted in a remotely positive light in The Survivors. It’s a cynical racket designed to fleece insecure men terrified of the ever-evolving nature of society.
Yet we have an innate tendency to identify with and root for the protagonists in Hollywood movies, particularly when they’re played by actors as famously lovable as Robin Williams. And it is impossible to root for a character who is stockpiling guns and training because he thinks a bunch of “looters” are going to hunt him down once society breaks down completely.
It turns out there’s a damn good reason that paranoid, right-wing conspiracy theorists, gun nuts and racist survivalists are seldom featured in films and if they are, they tend to inhabit broad supporting roles as either villains or wacky comic relief.
The Survivors disastrously makes one of these loathsome individuals its protagonist and suffers terribly as a result. If Robin Williams can’t make this archetype likable then no one can.
Williams has his moments in a movie with its share of laughs but they happen when he’s manic with nervous energy after his initial scuffle with Jack, not when he’s gone full-on Survivalist.
The Survivors works in fits and starts in its first hour but falls apart in a listless third act where our uniquely unlikable hero and villain square off against one another in a series of snowy, visually uninteresting tableaus.
Ritchie’s film opens with noted smart-ass Randy Newman rasping his way ironically through “Every Man a King”, a populist anthem by notorious Louisiana Governor and Senator Huey P. Long Jr.
It’s a bold choice that promises a more satirical film than Ritchie is able to deliver. Caught between social satire and crowd-pleasing scatology and crudeness, Ritchie gives into his worst, most mercenary instincts.
If nothing else, The Survivors is seldom boring but it does make me wonder if the fatal flaw of Lovable Losers/Bad with Money Month is that it will inherently involve watching a bunch of money-losing cinematic losers about losers that, like The Survivors’ unfortunate “hero” aren’t particularly lovable or endearing in the least.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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