Film Notes: Cutter's Way

Cutter's Way (1981) film notes by Tova Gannana for the L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise series, presented by Greg Olson Productions. The series runs through November 2025 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. 

Appearances are alibis. When Alex Cutter (John Heard) wants to be recognized as a Vietnam veteran, he puts on his old army jacket. “Duty is something I know a little bit about,” he tells a police officer who has been called to the scene of a car wreck caused by Alex, who had been drinking, who is always drinking, who is blind in one eye and has lost an arm and a leg in the Vietnam War. Alex holds court in a bar while talking about Moby Dick, “Great art demands a great artist.” In every room Alex is the center, the son of a town whose townspeople live under the illusion of safety because of prosperity, while teenagers dance at the disco and hitchhike home high on angel dust, while cars burn during fiesta time at the marina.

Alex reminds others that he is a veteran, which is to say that he is mostly reminding himself. Who is responsible and who is accountable are the main questions of Cutter’s Way (1981). Santa Barbara, where the film opens with the annual celebration of its colonial past, may not be a place like LA – where murder is commonplace – but it is a place where the body of a teenage girl is dumped in the garbage and the putative murderer, J. J. Cord (Stephen Elliot) is so brazen as to ride a horse the next day in the parade.

It’s hard to pinpoint what is universal and what is specific. Are all towns like this: bloody with a past playing out in the present, with veterans who return, some able to appear normal – whatever that means – and some who refuse to fit back in?

Alex swishes and swallows his Listerine. Friendship with Alex comes with mutual debt. George Swanson (Arthur Rosenburg) was taken in by Alex’s mother when his own mother died, so he frequently carries Alex home from the bar and gives Alex a place to live when he can no longer live with his wife, Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), who married Alex before the war and is waiting like a Dust Bowl survivor for better days. Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) works for George, flirts with Mo – who flirts back – and is best friends with Alex, who seems more like Bone’s antagonist: “The world lacks heroes, Rich,” Alex tells Bone, his voice loaded with anger, irony, sarcasm, bitterness. The town owes Alex his lineage. “I was once rich too,” Alex says, and he isn’t asking what he can do for Santa Barbara, because he already asked and acted once for his country.

Blue jeans soiled can be easily washed, can be hopped into or taken off, can cut a good figure, can create a silhouette, can hold a tucked-in shirt, are a uniform of the everyday. Bone is first seen shaving his moustache. He’s shirtless; he slips into his jeans like he’s getting out of the water. A woman in bed tells him that if he wants to, he can stay the night. Bone’s approach to his surroundings is as casual as a pair of denim; he’s loose around the edges. He’s the town’s witness, the only one to see what he saw: J. J. Cord in his element, driving away from his crime. He’ll get away with it too, Alex insists, unless Bone blackmails Cord along with Val Durran (Ann Dusenberry), the murdered girl’s older sister. George and Mo oppose this plan; so does Bone.

Mrs. Cord (Patricia Donahue) lunches at the country club while Mo drinks at home. Mrs. Cord wears the latest fashions for “ladies who dress their age”; Mo is ageless in a bathrobe. Both women are complicit in their respective husbands’ behavior, if only because instead of raging or turning them in, they stick around. Mrs. Cord throws banquets, owns serious jewelry, hires security guards, crowns her hair in hats. Mo keeps bottles of vodka in the freezer, keeps her hair back with a headband, colors her eyelids a silvery blue. She only cries once, though she seems as if she could cry all the time. It’s not just clothes the characters are wearing: Mo mostly smiles at Alex when she should be yelling; she laughs at Bone when she’s actually expressing her sadness.

Bone accuses Alex of too much imagination: “It’s your fantasy and my ass.” Bone wants to drop the case on Cord. Alex is relentless in his mission. The film is split two ways. Between Bone, who doesn’t want to be a hero because then he would become maimed like Alex; and Alex, who can’t ever be like Bone because he knows that J.J. Cord the citizen also acts as Cord Consolidated Oil the corporation. Cord may have murdered the teenage girl hitchhiking home from the disco, but Cord Consolidated Oil is what sent Alex to war. One can be blackmailed and prosecuted; the other will never be held accountable.

Bone shoots blanks with a carnival gun, hoping to win the prize of a doll. He fakes dropping off the blackmail letter while wearing a blazer and a blue button-up while Alex and Val wait in a black Buick. Alex is excited at the prospect of Cord reading the letter, of Cord getting the message that he’s been caught and will be exposed. Bone knows that Cord is protected, that his mirrored sunglasses show the town in reflection. Cord won’t call back, and not because Bone never delivered the letter. Bone says – and he sounds relieved – “Sorry, Alex there’s no sale,” except what Bone can’t grasp until the end is that Alex has already paid the price.