It is sometimes hard to tell what is a spoiler or not. 1966’s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round goes to great pains to conceal what it is about. We’ll discover in the third act the reason for the various things that have happened up until that point, and the revelation is so unremarkable as to frustrate the viewer. I suspect most people who see this will be wondering why the film takes such a circuitous and labored route to reveal nothing especially surprising.
There are parallel threads for most of the runtime. In one, James Coburn is a recent parolee who goes from one town to another, assuming a different persona and accent in each. In the other, federal agents prepare the Los Angeles airport for the arrival of the Russian Premier.
In each city Coburn visits, there will also be a different woman he will bed and inevitably steal something from. He’s is supposed to be suave and charming, but I have always found him a tad creepy, especially when he smiles. This film is no exception.
So, we follow Coburn from one city to the next, and one bad accent to another, but without any idea what is he is conspiring to do. The editing is especially abrupt and only compounds how disorienting it is to try to comprehend what he’s doing. He will eventually settle in LA. Since that’s where the Russian premier will be landing, is he planning on doing anything in regards to that?
And here’s where I am going to have to drop that spoiler that I don’t believe is a spoiler. Stop reading if you don’t want to know the key thing I have no idea why they concealed.
So, here goes: all Coburn and his associates are planning to do is rob a bank in LA. And they are timing it to be at the time the Russian official is landing, so the police presence will be focused on the airport. That’s it—that’s the whole thing. The film pointlessly jerked us around for roughly an hour to carefully conceal something it should have disclosed at the beginning. All the plot machinations meant nothing in the end.
In a way, I was reminded of all the bad movies that followed in the wake of Pulp Fiction. The torrent of similar films quickly made Tarantino’s film all that more remarkable. It turned out bad filmmakers simply messing with the chronology of events in their subpar pictures only emphasized how lacking they were.
I even hate the title Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. It’s the kind of thing that initially feels clever and then falls apart on closer inspection. I realize it is saying nobody could truly race another person on a merry-go-round, yet that doesn’t seem representative of the plot here. Instead, I felt it accidentally comments on the movie itself, something that thinks it is cleverer than it is, but which really takes us nowhere.
Dir: Bernard Girard
Starring James Coburn, Camilla Sparv, Aldo Ray
Watched on Kino Lobert blu-ray