End of the Road

Aram Avakian’s End of the Road (1970) may strike viewers fifty years on as oddly timely.

“Are you afraid of offending me by not agreeing with what I say?” Doctor D (James Earl Jones) in Aram Avakian’s End of the Road.

Oddest of all perhaps for the staying power of US social and political idiosyncrasies: race and civil rights, guns, abortion, law and order, unpopular foreign wars. The year 1968 when the film was shot was a watershed in American history as 2020 may turn out to be.

Spin-the-bottle with a Colt .45? US social and political idiosyncrasies’ odd staying power.

Who you gonna call? The “culture war” circa 1968: incidental sticker on a pay telephone.

Based on the plot of John Barth’s 1958 novel “The End of the Road,” the film co-written by Terry Southern [Dr. Strangelove (1964), Candy (1968), The Magic Christian (1969), etc.] serves up a fierce, hip circus of American social and political idiosyncrasies of the 1960s. Aimed at US Vietnam policy, the film clearly intends to inflict maximum feasible collateral damage as social and political commentary.

“It is required of a man, that he should share the passion and action of his time” Robert F. Kennedy

It features a variety of photo-montages composed of iconic period images of political figures and events, war, riot, revolution, reaction, op-art images and psychedelic US flags.

Strangers in a strange land: Doctor D (James Earl Jones) approaches a “catatonic” Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach) at Penn Station in Baltimore (actually a SEPTA station on the Philadelphia Main Line).

As for the story, an aimless young academic Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach) ends up stock still on a Baltimore railway platform for at least 20 hours “gazing on eternity”. He is approached by the eccentric Doctor D (James Earl Jones). The doctor diagnoses Horner with “immobility”, a personality disorder (a paralysis provoked in ambivalent minds by too much choice) and takes him to his “Remobilization Farm” in rural southeastern Maryland for analysis and treatment.

“Forgotten Ones” frolic on the grounds of Doctor D’s Remobilization Farm in Aram Avakian’s End of the Road.

“No, no: it is not real. Cause perhaps but no effect. Doing his own thing.” Doctor D on patient Sniperman (Ray Brock) in Remobilization Farm’s “protective condition of controlled reality”.

In consultation, Doctor D tells Horner to get a teaching job in the area as part of his treatment. Horner finds a position teaching prescriptive grammar at a local college. There he meets history professor Joe Morgan (Harris Yulin), a radical subjectivist and eternal Boy Scout who believes in the “immediate”, the power of logic, and in action as the exercise of command, and Morgan’s horsey, submissive wife Rennie (Dorothy Tristan). Morgan repeatedly frog-marches his wife and new friend through the Socratic method, all but forcing them to have an affair.

Professor Joe Morgan (Harris Yulin), a radical subjectivist and eternal Boy Scout: “No sense in apologizing. Ultimately nothing is defensible.”

“Real people don’t behave any differently when they’re alone”—Rennie Morgan (Dorothy Tristan).“Horsecrap! Nobody’s real”—Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach)

Horner’s therapy at Doctor D’s eccentric Remobilization Farm continues alongside his bachelor high jinx and developing relationships with the Morgans as a couple and individuals. But the film shorthands the last part of Barth’s book and ends with a puzzling visual ellipsis following a fatally botched attempt to get “the little biscuit out of the oven”.

“A path should be laid out where people walk, instead of walking where paths are laid” Joe Morgan (Harris Yulin) in Aram Avakian’s End of the Road.

Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach) in Doctor D’s (James Earl Jones) Progress and Advice Room.

The masterful chiaroscuro lighting in this film developed by cinematographer Gordon Willis would be used to stunning effect in The Godfather (1972 and 1974) among other films of this period that Willis shot. Among the details that made this film x-rated (at the time, age 16 and older; it has yet to be shown on British television) is the “Chicken Man scene” at Doctor D’s Farm, in which viewers see a man pleasuring himself with a squawking chicken.

“The strategy of protecting the ego by myth-making and role-assigning is called mythotherapy” —Doctor D (James Earl Jones) to Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach)

Barth reportedly was not happy with the film. His novel focuses in a more subtly humorous and meditative way on social and political hypocrisies of the 1950s, in particular the conflict between Horner, who sees many sides of nearly everything, and Morgan, a home-built radical subjectivist and libertarian who sees himself using the light of logic to illuminate paths of action. Morgan’s overbearing thought exercises force Horner and his wife to have an affair in order to produce further thought exercises. The affair produces something more down-to-earth. The wild ride Barth gives his own characters ends in a fatally botched (and at the time illegal) abortion, the fact of which disappears in a closing conspiracy of silence like a rock dropped in deep water. The road for Barth’s Horner ends at Remobilization Farm.

The film’s final credits run over images and clips of the Apollo 11 moon mission with Billie Holiday’s version of the Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler’s “Don't Worry ‘bout Me”.

“Darling why should you cling, to some fading thing
That used to be?
If you can’t forget, don’t worry ‘bout me.”

End of the Road 1970 U.S. (110 minutes) Max L. Raab Productions/Allied Artists; directed by Aram Avakian; screenplay by Avakian, Dennis McGuire, and Terry Southern from the novel by John Barth; cinematography by Gordon Willis; editing by Robert Q. Lovett; music by Teo Macero; produced by Stephen F. Kesten and Terry Southern.

Aram Avakian’s End of the Road features period photomontages with images such as this photo from Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign.