1978’s Straight Time would be a properly great film if it just stuck to being one story – about a felon trying to go straight. But instead it decides about halfway through that more juice can be squeezed by telling another story after the first one. The felon goes back to his old ways. Some exciting holdups and car chases and so on are the result, but a great film goes down the pan, to be replaced by one that’s merely OK.
Massive pity. They’d be two great films, in fact. But the first is where the real meat is, in the performance of Dustin Hoffman as the habitual thief who gets out of the penitentiary after a six-year stretch and then tries – how he tries – to go straight.
This includes finding somewhere to live, getting a regular job and finding a steady girlfriend, in the shape of Theresa Russell’s Jenny, a sweetheart who works at the employment agency Hoffman’s Max is forced to attend. She is attracted to him for a mix of reasons, but Max being a jailbird obviously twitches some of her rebellious impulses and on top of that he is a quietly spoken, self-deprecating, clearly smart guy with a disarmingly direct manner.
But having a job, a girl and a billet is not enough to keep Max out of trouble. An old friend with some bad habits, a parole officer riding him hard and fate dealing him a bad hand all push Max to the moment where he snaps, and we suddenly see what Hoffman’s performance has been suggesting all along, that there’s a whole other side to this man.
The IMDb suggests that Hoffman also directed this movie, alongside Ulu Grosbard, but in fact he was removed from directorial duties after a day of shooting revealed that his obsessive perfectionism suited acting a lot better than directing. Grosbard is admirably unfancy and delivers a dirty realism, helped by the great DP Owen Roizman – see The French Connection and Three Days of the Condor for more of that – shooting in real locations for a matter-of-fact documentary feel and a “you are there” ambience.
It’s the perfect backdrop for Hoffman’s performance, which is forensically precise, in the first half the guy trying to turn over a new leaf and hitting one frustration after another, which Max bears with stoicism and lip-buttoning. In the second half the real Max, less rational and charming, the one the parole officer could see, when we thought he was getting this man all wrong. Over the years Hoffman’s reputation and all those stories about his Method madness have slightly occluded his actual performances – this remarkable excavation of an individual’s flawed psychology is one of his best.
But then the entire cast is good, though Theresa Russell has not much to do beyond look pretty. M Emmet Walsh in an early role as Max’s parole officer, Gary Busey as Max’s old harum-scarum friend, Harry Dean Stanton as his partner in crime for the second half of the film, even Kathy Bates, in a very tiny early role, all remind us what a depth of acting talent there was beyond the usual famous names of the late 1970s.
The film is adapted from Edward Bunker’s novel No Beast So Fierce, which was informed by his own time in San Quentin. Bunker turns up in a small role, and much later would turn up as Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, which this film partly inspired.
Had Straight Time taken us right up to the point where Max finally abandons his dream and reverts to type, a brilliant pressure-cooker thriller would have resulted – I’m guessing. As it is it’s 50 per cent of that and then 50 per cent of a different type of film, again a brilliant one, this time about the travails of the smalltime crook. How hard it is to get stuff done, people letting you down, the sheer slog of putting a job together, and doing it properly.
What we can see which Max can’t see, and the reason why he’s just done a six-year stretch and is likely to do more, is because he’s just not suited to the profession he’s chosen. Max is the crazy mixed-up kid of 1970s lore, but not in his own mind. How well Hoffman catches it all.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
