Cinema: Conned Goods

The Film Flam Man. Deep in tobacco country, a burned-out grifter (George C. Scott) is shoved from a moving freight car. A young drifter (Michael Sarrazin) dusts him off and helps him to his feet. The two quickly discover that they have some things in common—cunning and duplicity. The grifter is the Flim Flam Man, a wheezy, sleazy slicker who for half a century has taken yokels with potency pills, crooked cards and his smooth Mason-Dixon line. The drifter is AWOL from Fort Bragg, and hungry. Scott proposes a merger, and the two are soon fast-shuffling their way to fortune, until the locals get wise to their brand of three-card monte and call the cops.

On the lam, the two fugitives dash from town to town, sleeping in the open air and profitably peddling conned goods between solid slapstick sequences and comic car chases. Finally, there is a farmer’s daughter (Sue Lyon). The drifter steals her car—and falls in love with her. Too late, he decides to go straight. Before he can turn himself in to the MP’s, the sheriff catches up with the two tricksters and claps them into jail. There Sarrazin realizes that a cage will kill the old buzzard, and risks his life and love in an attempt to spring the Flim Flam Man one more time.

Half comedy, half drama, Flim Flam is really two films that, superimposed, tend to cancel each other out. The drama tries for realism, indicts mankind for the universal greed and gullibility upon which parasites like the Flim Flam Man prosper. But the actors who play his prey all deliver caricatures instead of portraits in a gallery of outlandish Southern yahoos such as never dwelt outside Dogpatch.

Scott spiels and deals like a 19th century bunco artist out of Texas Guinan by W. C. Fields, yet incongruously wheels a shiny red convertible around like a hell driver. His partner, mooning around Sue Lyon’s earthy smile, is a love-struck leftover from turn-of-the-century melodrama, yet speaks the language of the contemporary soldier. Like the cars its heroes steal and riotously wreck, the script starts strong but plots its own collision course, and eventually piles up in a harmless heap of miscellaneous parts that no longer mesh. The viewer, who begins by sympathizing with the Flim Flam Man, ends film-flammed as another one of his victims.