Vincent Albarano looks back on Peter Pearson’s 1973 drama about a hockey playing wannabe cowboy stuck in a small Canadian town
Among the many sketches of Grindhouse decadence and decay captured in his essential Sleazoid Express zine, Bill Landis wrote of the Fake Man — The Ecco: the one who deludes himself while walking confidently and arrogantly through life in shoes that are not his own. Presented as a distinctly Times Square phenomenon in Landis’ pages, the Fake Man exists beyond that space as a resolutely real archetype of masculine insecurity. In fact, a score of New Hollywood protagonists embody this character type, tracing back to predecessors such as Burt Lancaster’s turn as Ned Merrill in Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968), a lineage recognized by Landis himself. English language cinema of the 1970s is abundant with masculine character studies, but just as a group of American upstarts kicked the dormant Hollywood system into a new gear, their neighbors to the north had similar aims of their own. Films like Goin’ Down the Road (1970) and The Hard Part Begins (1973) were acclaimed as massive statements upon release, or have been reclaimed as such retrospectively. But one of the most bruising accounts of this persona to be captured on celluloid is found in Peter Pearson’s disquieting 1973 Canadian production Paperback Hero, which melds the dead-end emotional isolationism of American New Wave films with a distinctly Canadian sense of geographic malaise. It is an unforgiving character study whose resolution is inevitable from its opening frames, one that never asks us to align ourselves with its protagonist and gains its most cutting insights from the gulf forged between spectator and character.
The film’s opening credits roll against a heavily overcast and moody outdoor scene, a desolate stretch of plains bathed in the pre-dawn light. A lone Stetson-clad figure marches across the screen and freezes before drawing his pistol, sloppily firing at a row of glass bottles. This is small town hockey star Rick Dylan (Keir Dullea), whose western wear is often accompanied by his letterman jacket as a proud anachronism. The soundtrack kicks in with a rollicking piano number, the atmospheric visual touches immediately undermined by the soundtrack cue, the first of the film’s many delusions. As the remaining 90 minutes unfold, Pearson makes painfully clear that his concern is in probing the willful denial of obligation and decency.
Immersed in the dead-end boredom of remote Saskatchewan, Rick’s world is dominated by masculine illusions and the behavior he sees justified in his fetishization of the American West. He’s dating the sweet, all too understanding Loretta (Elizabeth Ashley), who convinces herself that he’s going to propose to her (he gave her a waffle iron, after all). All the while, and with her embarrassed knowledge, Rick is carrying on affairs with Joanna (Dayle Haddon), daughter of team owner Big Ed (Franz Russell), as well as women in several other towns. An infamous recent incident saw Rick throw a woman down a flight of stairs, but even the spread of this news around town has done little to impact his status. He works in a general store and gets his kicks through sex, hockey, and target practice with his six shooter when he isn’t causing trouble in the local bar. Rick questions nothing and is always ready to assert his own self-appointed authority.
The first third of the film establishes Rick’s daily routine, his various affairs, and reputation. Brief interactions with his family reveal their concern for his future and hopes that he’ll escape town and make something more of life in the big city. Rick’s cowboy persona is initially played as an eccentric affectation, something that generates tension but is often played for laughs. He receives little pushback and his small fish status is cemented with little sense that he could desire anything more from life.
As the film begins to zero in on Rick’s ambitions and those held for him by others, a sense of place and limited opportunity become more prominent within the narrative. With the town unable to maintain the hockey team’s upkeep — namely, an ice rink that won’t stay frozen — the team announces its plan to fold after its next game. Big Ed urges Rick to head to Saskatoon with Joanna to pursue real work, but he’s adamant about staying close to home. Loretta pleads with Rick to make an honest woman of her and intimates that she’d even overlook his various indiscretions. Here’s where the aimlessness and boredom of small-town life creeps in, the destructive and drunken mischief of men at a dead end. Their bad habits and mistreatment of others is shown to be permitted because they have the closest approximations of status in this go-nowhere world. Rick’s womanizing and abusive behavior isn’t played as lightly in this stretch, and the stagnation of the town and those around him weigh heavier as the rot begins to spread.
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If the first hour of the film unfolds with the sense of decisions already made, actions telegraphed and inevitable in their outcome, the final third depicts Rick’s first moves toward becoming an active protagonist. As a result, it’s the most interesting and depressing section of an already unremittingly bleak prospect. The same sense of inevitability pervades the final march to the conclusion, but the integration of causes and consequences for actions make it worthy of deeper analysis.
The third act dawns with Rick and his pal and teammate Harry (John Beck) waking up hungover in jail for vandalizing a car on the street. Loretta bails Rick out (in front of Jack Burdock, her would-be suitor and sheriff of the town), only to be told he isn’t sure when he’ll be good to pay her back. She lamely asserts that she isn’t expecting it. In the next scene, Rick is with Joanna again. In this world, hangovers are simply the men’s lot in life, and the women’s burden to deal with. Just after these unhappy reunions, the team’s final game erupts into violence when it is canceled due to the unsafe condition of the ice. In a flash, both teams are at one another’s throats, a long-simmering tension released with the referees as collateral damage as fans storm the ice. While the film resorts to rapid edits through a series of close-ups split between players giving and receiving violence and the enthralled fans as they call for blood, Rick’s would-be heroism is reduced to shame as he attacks the cops and flees the ongoing melee.
Alone in the country, to the strains of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” Rick learns that Ed has sent Joanna to Saskatoon without him, and that he’s wanted by the police for his role in the riot. He rushes to catch her bus, blocking the road with his car and holding the driver at gunpoint. This stick up reveals a great deal about Rick’s position in town, as he presents his weapon with comic gallantry, but the driver and the viewer know full well that it’s loaded and have no reason to assume stability on the part of the would-be cowboy. They elope, Rick plowing his convertible through barren farmland to the swelling of Lightfoot’s track, but rather than a bit of romantic heroism it’s presented as a culminating moment of insanity.
Here the film’s atmosphere matches its emotional desolation, with scenic shots of dead trees and fields, abandoned farms and decaying ruins of once-occupied spaces. Hiding out in one such farmhouse, Joanna confronts Rick, challenging his desire to control and dominate her just to feel better about himself. His response proves that, in his own mind, Rick can still do no wrong: “Stop trying to make an asshole out of me… I’ve got respect in this town. Do you know the last time I had to buy a beer?” “Five years from now,” Joanna responds, “nobody will remember you.” These are the words that finally perturb Rick. He reacts the only way he knows how, shoving her into the wall. She flees with his car, leaving him humiliated in the dust and determined to prove that he isn’t a laughingstock.
Galvanized by this challenge to his very identity, Rick returns to town with his pistol at the ready, shooting stoplights as he tries to lure sheriff Burdock out for a showdown. In his mind, Rick has assumed the role of the lone gunfighter at war with authority, still refusing to look inward for his true antagonist. Loretta rushes to Rick’s side. Before the final, inevitable outburst of violence, the camera pulls out wide and reveals one last time just how small and isolated this town is. With Loretta in his embrace, Rick feigns surrender, shows off a trick shot on a police siren before dropping Burdock and getting picked off himself. The film closes with extreme close-ups on faces of elderly onlookers, before fixing on Loretta’s weeping eyes. The credits roll over Rick’s lonesome body bleeding out in the street.
While it is beholden to its national identity, part of the fascination in Pearson’s film is its mining of uniquely American tropes and archetypes, perverting and distorting them within a contemporary place and time. Paperback Hero is both an of-the-moment character study as well as a revisionist Western that dispels the frontier myths that undergird American legend. Their spread to Canada reveals that such falsehoods and illusions proliferate, though little has changed to relegate them to history alone. As much as Rick deceives himself as to who he truly is, the film also makes apparent that the persona he has adopted is tainted with hypocrisy and false grandeur. See the barroom scene where Rick plays lawman to deal with some longhairs he thought were making fun of him: he decks one, taking command of the situation in parody of an Old West showdown, but scurries out the back door as soon as the cops walk in, an act mirrored at the hockey riot after he attacks Burdock from the stands. His courage never lasts long enough to consider consequences or repercussions.
Paperback Hero captures the rancid nostalgia of longing for an imagined past, even beyond Rick’s cowboy aspirations. He and Harry dream about going pro, but their desire is presented as a distorted vision imagined a hundred years in the past. The film explores the historical reality of patriarchal controls and violence. Rick has athletic promise and is genuinely charismatic, but his façade fails him and those who want to take him for the man he could be. Moments of genuine affection threaten to creep in. Rick’s one-on-one session with Loretta on the hockey rink reveals just what she might see in him when he’s capable of decency, yet the illusion doesn’t last long. Rick seems set on self-destruction. After leaving the ice, they curl up together in the shower, tranquil in post-coital comfort. She asks when he’s planning to propose and Rick becomes evasive, wondering what she sees in him. Gunfighters had wives, but Rick says he’d just be off trying to satiate his big appetite. It’s an admission of weakness as much as it’s a masculine put on, and sadder because Loretta is willing to turn a blind eye to the indiscretions. Rick uses his western fetish as a justification for his philandering, but never seems to consider just how pathetic it all makes him seem. He lists the other women he’s chasing, the parts of their bodies he lusts after. Loretta slaps him in disgust, and Rick’s response is to strike back, sending Loretta cowering in the corner as he expresses rage and confusion at her reaction. The camera pulls back from the shower cubicle to the empty locker room and Rick’s crumpled letterman jacket. The next day, Loretta comes into the shop and tries to assure Rick that things are fine between them as they are. Delusion runs both ways, and Rick acts as a black hole of ego, consuming those around him to suit his narrow aims.
The fact that these actions are presented and received unquestioningly reveals how the rot is societal, ingrained into the world itself as depicted in this provincial microcosm. Men talk about women as conquests, sought after out of a sense of rivalry rather than as human beings on their own merit. For all his romanticized ideals of frontier life, Rick’s needs are purely base: carnal, the thrill of sport, and asserting himself among the other men. His pose is a regression. At the same time, there’s the trap that his hometown offers little chance for progress or promise, this outlook is ingrained in those even without his deluded posturing. This is exemplified in Rick’s grandfather’s story about his generation’s hockey team lusting after a teenaged girl and the ruin it wrought upon them, yet her status is never considered. The bad behavior that Rick indulges in and believes sets him apart is inherent to the culture surrounding him, is indeed part and parcel of his very upbringing. Ultimately, there’s nothing unique about him in the slightest.
The film also explores the lives of Rick’s friends to reveal a shared vein of domestic disquietude. Scenes in Harry’s trailer employ some striking handheld camerawork, pushing in on the claustrophobic quarters and conditions that drive him and his wife to worry for the future. Still, he’s as set in his ways as Rick, offering a sardonic birthday wish when she expresses angst over the course of her life at just 29. Later, Harry tries to tear down the skeleton of the house he’s building for his family after the team folds. With one dream dead, the odds seem insurmountable for any others to come to fruition and destruction is the only course available in his mind. The moment is captured in an extended, extreme long shot set against an ominous dusky sky, both Harry and his wife rendered shadows. Even more clearly than Rick himself, Harry vents his existential angst: “There’s just too much goddamn sky, and not enough of me.”
For all of its soul-searching and longing, what really stands out is the film’s desolation, its inescapable sense of entrapment. Isolated in the company of rough men who showed him the way, Rick acts out this fantasy as a masculine form of wish fulfillment; however, Rick’s ultimate desire seems to be uniqueness, of some chance at feeling special in a world that seems uncaring and even pointless. The sad trap is that in a pond so small, Rick couldn’t help but stand out even if he didn’t go to such great lengths. In many ways, the small victories and lascivious freedom Rick asserts for himself represent the dead end of New Hollywood’s male rebellion, the darker depths of unchecked bad behavior and its consequences. His angst is achingly familiar, yet Rick’s repugnance never allows for sympathy. In trying to stand out and be somebody, he ultimately reveals just how average he really is and how stale his very existence has become. The film’s resolution reveals that only in his spectacular death could Rick Dylan leave his mark on the world. Confined by the narrow-mindedness of his hometown and stifled by his own refusal to look anywhere beyond, Pearson’s protagonist reminds us of the entirely fictional nature of his titular concept.
Vincent Albarano is the author of Aesthetic Deviations: Shot-On-Video Horror, 1984-1994. Purchase a copy from Headpress or Amazon
Check out his Experimental Kindergarten zines here
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