Steelyard Blues plays like the work of well-meaning but inexperienced people that hope that by assembling some cool people in a free-form script, magic will happen. We instead get a picture with production problems. The film's 'biggest' scene is a face-off between twenty cop cars and a plane that wants to taxi off the runway. It comes to nothing, as if the time limit on the police cruiser rental expired before the director figured out what to do with them.

Star Donald Sutherland helped gather the cast, including Roger Bowen from his big hit M*A*S*H. Sutherland worked the previous year on Klute with Jane Fonda, who returns to again play prostitute to his not-so-straight man. The rest of the cast comes from the comedy group The Committee, musician friends and other hipster hangers-on.

Nobody makes much of an impression. Sutherland does his clumsy fool act and sweeps up lion poop with an unhappy look on his face, while Fonda is just terrible in an awful wig, making some kind of statement about the ethics of being a 'working girl.' In many scenes characters are just thrown together to 'get crazy.' Actors like young John Savage end up as extra baggage, doing quiet schtick that barely registers. Wild man Peter Boyle gets plenty of screen time strutting about in silly circus costumes (Master of Ceremonies, etc) and ends up falling back on a (rather good) Marlon Brando impression to disguise the fact that he doesn't have a character to play.

Director Alan Myerson went on to a long and fruitful TV career. He must have been working under very limited conditions because setups, coverage and sometimes even lighting are compromised. Some of the tedium is alleviated by the music of Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, featuring Maria Muldaur. But the essentially artificial story of a crew of misfit loonies working on the perfect crime doesn't come together. (spoiler) The confused ending is either a paste-up job or just incompetent: the escape plane never gets off the ground, and we last see our characters riding horses to reach an unseen helicopter mentioned only in a rough voiceover. Perhaps David S. Ward's original screenplay The Last Crash meant to have them all killed when the plane explodes, for a wacky laugh?

Steelyard Blues may be just the cup of tea for a certain group of nonconformists, but it really shows the lack of direction that dogged early 70s moviemaking ... "You know, for kids!" It was barely a blip in the careers of its main talent, as the producers, writer and top stars went on to put together some of the best films of the latter part of the decade. Phillips, Phillips and Ward had a home run the very next year with the completely different The Sting.

Warners' DVD of Steelyard Blues is an excellent enhanced transfer of a film that in Los Angeles kept showing up in tattered prints on desperation double bills. The English mono is clear. Besides a woefully unappetizing trailer, we get a rare treat in the form of the featurette Would You Believe?. The promo follows the manic Peter Boyle around New York as he tries out his comedy/performance art gags on Fifth Avenue street corners.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Steelyard Blues rates:
Movie: Fair
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Trailer, featurette Would You Believe?
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: June 10, 2007