Their names are Bo and Harley and they're a couple of footloose kids who own a customized yellow '57 Chevy with pinstriping and fuel injection. Their dream is to point 'er West and win the Grand National drag races in California. They start in the South. They have $50 between them. In those days you could get to California on 50 bucks. But they make a fateful error they stop in a hamburger joint, get in a fight, somehow pick up the waitress (whose name is Junell) and get in all sorts of trouble because of her.
"You know something?" Harley says to Bo. "She isn't exactly playing with a full deck." Harley is right. Junell is a sweet, round faced girl with a friendly smile and a gun in her purse that her daddy gave her. She is apt to pull out the gun at the most unexpected times like in a grocery store, or when she's trying to get back the $50 after it's taken by a smalltown hood in a black '53 Ford. It is a measure of the quaintness of 1958 that Bo and Harley are horrified by the handgun and keep trying to throw it away.
Anyway, while the three of them are trying to get away with the money, they run broadside into a police car, and in the confusion that follows they hit the cop, who immediately goes off the deep end and declares an undying vendetta against them. He gives chase, and so the hood and his buddies, and the movie develops into a sort of lowbudget "The Sugarland Express" with cops staked out all along the route.
All of this may sound fairly uninspiredÑand, believe me, it is, but "Return to Macon County" isn't exactly a bad movie. Richard Compton's direction shows a certain style, given a limited budget, and the performances by Nick Nolte and Don Johnson (as Bo and Harley) and Robin Mattson (as Junell) have some dimension to them. The characters themselves aren't supposed to be terribly deep, but within their limitations they manage to convince us. Miss Mattson, in particular, has that sort of adolescent gleam in her eyes that means damn the consequences.
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