Director: Maurice Hurley
Cast: Lance Henriksen, Barra Grant, Bill Moor, Granville Van Dusen

While it's fun and interesting to look at modern day famous actors in the here and now, there's plenty of interesting observations to see how they were years before they were famous. It can be interesting to look at the early credits for an actor or actress to see what might have influenced their later, more famous roles. For example, you've probably heard of actress Rue McClanahan, who is most famous for her role on the 1980s television show The Golden Girls, where she played the man-hungry (to put it mildly) Blanche Devereaux. What you might not know about her is that it is extremely likely she got inspiration for that role from a movie she made in 1963 during her salad days called Five Minutes To Love (a.k.a. The Rotten Apple), where she played a young woman who was hungry for men and women. Generally, however, it is interesting to look at the bottom of a major star's resume to see how they started out in the movie or television industries and climbed their way to superstardom. Michael Caine (Surrender), for example, toiled in the UK movie industry in minor (and sometimes uncredited) roles for about eight years, but he didn't give up. Canie's professional performances and work ethic eventually won over the producers of Zulu, where he was cast in a somewhat meatier role than usual. The success of the movie and his well-regarded performance got producer Harry Saltzman to offer Caine the lead role in The Ipcress File, which was a big hit that made Caine a major player. Years later, there was the case of Brad Pitt. He started out playing non-speaking extras in forgettable movies such as Hunk, and eventually started to get more substantial roles in movies such as the slasher Cutting Class, still driven towards success. When he was offered a supporting role in the major Hollywood studio movie Thelma & Louise, he grabbed it despite being offered a fairly low salary, seeing it as a great opportunity. Needless to say, it was a great opportunity.

I am sure that Michael Caine, Brad Pitt, and even Rue McClanahan to a degree, look back on their early careers without much (if any) shame and see that they were just simply paying their dues on their way to their ultimate goals of breaking out in the industry. But there are definitely some actors who are embarrassed by one or more acting assignments when they were struggling to get work. I'll give you an example now, that being of Sylvester Stallone (Avenging Angelo). In 1970, he was a very broke and homeless struggling actor, with only one previous film credit to his name (1969's The Square Root, which even I hadn't heard of before writing this review.) He admitted later he was close to committing a crime because he was at his lowest point. Then he was offered a lead role in a movie called The Party At Kitty And Stud's. There was a catch, however - he had to take off his clothes a lot for the role. Stallone later on recalled, "And I thought: 'Why not? After all, I take off my clothes alone at home every night.'" Stallone worked for two days for $200, and the finished movie was barely released to theaters, and was subsequently completely and quickly forgotten... until Stallone's breakout hit Rocky was released in 1976. The owners of TPAKAS realized they now had a gold mine on their hands, and tried to "persuade" Stallone to fork over $100,000 dollars so that the movie would be permanently buried. Stallone refused to pay up, and while he was probably happy he stood up to blackmail, he was almost certainly embarrassed when the movie was subsequently re-released with great publicity to theaters (under the new title Italian Stallion), then subsequently released on VHS and later DVD.

Having (unfortunately) seen the movie for myself, let me change my last remark: he was certainly embarrassed. However, the movie does possibly show how Stallone learned to take off his clothes in front of the camera for future movies such as Tango & Cash and Rocky V. There are many other actors whose past roles, before becoming stars in the public's eye, have given me great interest, whether they were embarrassing or not for the actor at the time or years later. One of those actors is Lance Henriksen (Lost Voyage). Though he made a small appearance as a background extra in the 1961 movie The Outsider, his first real acting role in front of a camera was with the obscure 1972 drama It Ain't Easy. What makes this early effort especially interesting was not only was it a lead role, Henriksen - due to an especially rough childhood - had only learned how to read two years earlier. The idea of being thrust into a spotlight of sorts with his first real movie acting role intrigued me, so I knew I had to look at the end results, even though reportedly Henriksen has looked back on this debut of his with great embarrassment. Henriksen plays a fellow named Randy Sorenson, who is suffering from psychological problems because - as it is always with movies in this period about people with mental problems - he served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. After leaving a VA hospital, Randy has holed up in an isolated cabin in Minnesota where he plans to resume his pre-war life as a trapper, but his prospects for making a living aren't great partly because no one is buying pelts anymore, and his mental condition has been made worse by him going off his meds.. When he gets wind of an upcoming snowmobile race in the area that promises a huge cash prize for the winner, he decides to go for it. Heading towards the Canadian province of Manitoba to enter the race, along the way he picks up a hitchhiker named Jennifer (Penelope Allen, Doc), and at first, they get along well. However, eventually Jenny starts to see that Randy is crumbling mentally, and with the stress coming from the desire to enter the race and win it, Randy may very well break permanently under the pressure.

I know, the most pressing question you have on your mind is concerning Lance Henriksen; how does this future cult movie star come across in his first big role when he wasn't at the time famous? Well, I don't think Henriksen, regarding It Ain't Easy, has anything to be embarrassed about... at least when it comes to his performance. Viewers will see that even at 32 years of age, he already looked much older than his actual age, but that didn't concern me. I was fairly impressed at what he managed to deliver in his performance here, showing a range of emotions through the 79-minute running time. There's light joviality when he talks to his doctor in the first scene, and later when his character starts to deal with negative emotions such as flashbacks or humiliation, Henriksen is careful not to emote so much that he'd become a caricature. He also puts in some nice small touches, like trembling to just the right degree when his freezing character is struggling to light a fire. It's a perfectly good first performance, though one has to wonder what Henriksen might have been able to accomplish had his character been written a lot better. For starters, he doesn't have a good number of opportunities to express his character's past, or his character's opinions and feelings. For example, in the opening scene we learn about the horrors Randy went through in the Vietnam War, but this information comes from two doctors discussing this, instead of from Randy himself. Later, his character sees a sign advertising the big race, and his character subsequently simply signs up for the race without him ever expressing to anyone why participating in this race and winning it would mean so much to him, whether it be just for the money or something much more. When one of the people in town learns about Randy entering the race, this character clearly doesn't think much about Randy and his ambitions... but why does this character have mocking hostility towards Randy? We don't learn what happened in the past. In fact, earlier in the movie, a more friendly resident (played by Joseph Maher, who was in I.Q.) has to explain some of Randy's past to the audience, going to Randy and telling him about his now deceased mother and father.

Wouldn't Randy already know what that family friend knew about his parents? Or was Randy for some bizarre reason never curious about them? The screenplay by Mary Olson is really lacking a clear look into the central character of Randy... and in a few other aspects as well. But before I get into those things, I will say that It Ain't Easy's director, Maurice Hurley (who went on to produce successful television shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation) does manage to keep the movie moving along, with some nice touches sprinkled throughout, in a manner so that the weaknesses regarding the character of Randy don't dominate viewers' minds. Despite the movie's low budget and not being made by Hollywood filmmakers, the movie is more technically accomplished than you might think. Camera angles are generally well chosen, and other camerawork shows real ambition, such as shooting from moving snowmobiles or other vehicles. The general vibe of the movie is that classic and soothing "on the road" feeling that's often found in independent movies of this period, and I admit that I ate it all up. There are some quite impressive visuals of the snowy Minnesota countryside, and some nice soft rock songs on the soundtrack. However, there are times when some amateurish touches come up. There's one sequence where it's not made clear until the end if it's happening in the present, in the past, or just in Randy's mind. A later scene where Randy expresses a great feeling of accomplishment is filmed almost entirely with Randy far into the background, so we can't see the expression on his face as he gleefully expresses himself.

A directorial mistake bigger than all those I described in the previous paragraph happens about two-thirds of the way into It Ain't Easy... though it could be argued that some of the blame falls again on the screenplay. Now, I am not the one to reveal big spoilers in the movies that I review, so I can't mention exactly what twist happens at that point in the movie. However, I can say that when it does happen, the rest of the movie (at least up to the final scene) unfolds in an uncomfortably sad and pathetic manner. It would have been much better had the screenplay be rewritten so that the general idea of the twist be revealed just before the end - it might have then delivered more of a wallop and felt more correct, despite it still being a sad twist of sorts. But even if this had been done, there would still be the problem of the last scene of the movie, where suddenly the tone of the movie changes wildly to become happy enough that the movie ends on a yuk-yuk note that really doesn't fit with what we'd seen in the movie up to that point. But even if that ending had been fine tuned, we'd still remember some scripting problems that occurred earlier. There's a long sequence where Randy and Jennifer stop during their journey so that Randy can race his snowmobile around an empty track. While the scene does end with that aforementioned joyful outburst of Randy's, there is still the feeling that it's pretty much padding. Speaking of Jennifer, the relationship she has with Randy is really poorly constructed. The two first meet when Randy goes up to her at a cafe in the middle of nowhere, immediately asks her to be the driver of his truck to the big race, and she immediately accepts, no questions asked. Later, I don't think the two have enough time to bond so that Jennifer's subsequent caring about him and her worries about his safety are warranted. It Ain't Easy won't be an easy movie for any casual moviegoer to embrace. I admit that this critic had a kind of soft spot for it, with his love of independent 1970s road movies, but boy, it wasn't easy for him to maintain that feeling. Even those casual movie fans who have a love of seeing future cult stars deep in their salad days might find it as very bumpy a viewing experience as riding a snowmobile across those snowy Minnesota plains.

(Posted May 3, 2024)