With a handful of noirs, a couple of comedies, a sexploitation horror film, and a weed/musical/road picture, Bob Chinn really cut through the genres in the 70’s like no other filmmaker in the adult world (and only like a precious few in the mainstream world). Perhaps outdoing them all, Chinn served up an honest-to-goodness western in 1978 with Lipps & McCain. The pleasantly amusing tale of two shitkicking loafers, Lipps & McCain, the second (and final) film Chinn made for Dick Aldrich’s Tenaha Timpson Releasing, is often under-remarked and underrated and serves as yet another charming and expert piece of filmmaking from Chinn’s 1976-1979 hot streak, a time where he was busier than a one-armed paper hanger and could do little wrong.
Nevada Lipps (Ric Lutze) and Sunstroke McCain (Paul Thomas) are a couple of amiable, low-key cowboys who can barely stay one step ahead of the suckers they cheat at cards. Looking for work at a friendly ranch in the area, they find that most all of the jobs have been subcontracted to people with superior and modern equipment (like helicopters). Hired on as lowly coyote hunters, they immediately strike out on the job and head over to Amy Cantrell’s whorehouse. There, they are given a chance to collect a $4,000 bounty on Diamondhead, a legendary coyote in the area.
While searching for Diamondhead, they run across Scarlet P. Maguire (Amber Hunt), a runaway bride whose Jeep gets flooded (or, according to McCain, it’s an issue with its rotors… he knows about Jeeps). After mistaking a romantic dalliance between some bikers in the distant bushes as the marauding coyote the two are hunting, Lipps accidentally shoots a man in the ass. They escape with Maguire in tow while they are followed in pursuit by the bikers. The chase eventually adds Scarlett’s mobbed-up, jilted fiancée AND a bunch of cowboys they rip off in the early moments in the film.
Like a Chuck Jones cartoon where one calamity follows another until, by the end, every single bit of chaos creates a cumulative whirlwind that is but two steps behind the main character, Lipps & McCain also has more than just a slight amount of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid running through its veins. The film opens on a orchestrated rescue from a rigged card came and ends with our heroes with their backs against the wall. Along the way, they engage in nighttime banter through the walls of their adjacent rooms, take refuge in a friendly whorehouse, and Lipps will bemoan the McCain’s poor attitude by saying “bitch, bitch, bitch” in utter exasperation.
Budgetary concerns likely insisted that Lipps & McCain be a revisionist western replete with contemporary touches like 78 model automobiles, Jeeps, an interstate, neon signs, and a motorhome because, let’s face it, horses are expensive, difficult to wrangle, and dangerous for inexperienced (and undoubtedly uninsured) riders. As adult westerns are generally hit or miss due to their inauthentic phoniness and arch (or non-existent) acting, Lipps & McCain works a whole lot better than most by being able to operate in an unmoored subgenre of the semi-modern western which allows it to slip between Cowboys-and-Indians put-on and rambunctious action comedy with a western flavor. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch, this film does lightly touch on time passing these guys by and the film’s adherence to its anachronistic world helps underscore that notion by explicitly making its two main characters out-of-time. Because of this, Amber Hunt’s runaway bride feels like it’s less from a traditional western but, instead, jumped straight out of the previous year’s Smokey and the Bandit, a completely unavoidable monster hit the size of which generally gets undersold due to the fact that it would have been the highest grossing film of 1977 if not for Star Wars.
Outside of its almost perfect balance of story and sex in which all of the amorous moments happen as naturally as they would in a mainstream film, Lipps & McCain succeeds due to the surprisingly strong chemistry found among the cast. Paul Thomas’s $250 Beverly Hills hairdo makes him look like he’s going to the same barber as Michael Landon on Little House on the Prairie but he comes off loose and relaxed in his role (as was his norm). The casting of Lutze was something of a compromise as producer Dick Aldrich refused to once again deal with John Holmes. As the project had been envisioned with Holmes as one of the two leads, the swap wasn’t much of a bargain; Lutze wasn’t Holmes but he WAS Lutze. In a pound-for-pound matching of Holmes’s gasbag ego with Lutze’s insufferable trait of not keeping his goddamn trap shut during his sex scenes and thereby sounding like the dumbest gearhead in the back of science class, the result is an explicit case of a lateral move; six of one, half dozen of another.
But Lutze and Thomas make for a better pair than they do on paper and, by god, they look like they’re having a hell of a good time amid the rather physical demands asked of them as they ride horses up and down the wide open exteriors. As is to be expected, Thomas is a fucking scream and he shares such a nice, natural rapport with Lutze so much so that when Thomas blows a line during an early campfire scene, Lutze immediately picks it up and the moment is kept alive and plays a little more comically than written.
Amber Hunt gets much more of a role here than she did in Candy Stripers and she’s quite good as as the strong-willed go-getter that kicks the two in the ass and makes them try and make something better of themselves. And even if she can’t match the spunky energy of Sally Field, she makes more of an impression than Katherine Ross. Chris Cassidy, a Chinn MVP who made Candy Stripers sing and would continue to shine in the same year’s The China Cat and 1980’s Sadie, is a sun-kissed slice of pure joy as the biker mama who turns on her pack to join forces with our hapless trio. Special mention should be given to NoCal regular Dale Meador who is his usual delightful self in a dual role as a cigar-chomping ranch owner and a mostly-deaf motel clerk.
Like Tropic of Desire would do the following year, Lipps & McCain takes time out of its schedule to explicitly humanize sex workers through its attitude and its dialogue, creating big wins for all of the characters but also for the actors who sacrificed a great deal when they appeared in adult films. Written by John Chapman, also the scribe behind Chinn’s Hard Soap, Hard Soap and Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, the film is more ambling and less zany than either one of those. But, as was the case in a lot of films by Bob Chinn (even those not written by Chapman), the girls completely run the show as both Lipps and McCain are a couple of inveterate fuck-ups who, in stark contrast to any one of the gals in the piece, have absolutely nothing on the ball. They are, functionally speaking, just barely more competent than Wile E. Coyote and Elmer Fudd.
If the multiple Ennio Morricone lifts in the first six Johnny Wadd movies didn’t drive it home, Lipps & McCain REALLY illustrates what a Sergio Leone devotee Chinn is. Sticking spaghetti western guitar stings in a soundtrack that varies between a little Dixieland jazz, some old country and western standards, and a lilting, harmonica-driven score, Chinn gets to let it all hang out with some extended opening credits that are right out of Once Upon a Time in the West, even down to the purposefully awkward “Guest Star Suzanne Meyers” credit which occurs just before the title of the film materializes on the screen which, by my watch, is a full thirteen minutes into the feature. Nice.
Technically accomplished and finely polished, Lipps & McCain was nonetheless a very tricky shoot. 90% of it is in the great outdoors with honest-to-goodness campfire scenes captured in actual nighttime by cinematographer Lazlo Croveny. Shots were difficult to set-up and pull off, the cast was made up of people who had maybe seen a picture of a horse but had no real hands-on experience riding them, and there was an added pressure of having to orchestrate believable motorcycle and car chases to follow along with the more conventional and languid western action (well-edited by Jeffery Neal). Bill Wolf’s whorehouse and motel sets are fun but his mine shaft set, cleverly constructed out of trash bags and wood beams, is a real piece of DIY ingenuity (though, as much as I like the set, one of the film’s issues is that the story and film parks there and gives up in its last fifteen minutes).
Due to cost, logistics, and the exhausting prospect of mounting such a production, save and except Walter Hill, many of the best of the scrappy genre filmmakers of the New Hollywood era expressed a desire to make a Western without really pulling one off. But it can be said with straight-faced conviction that, when he was given the opportunity, Bob Chinn actually pulled it off. So, in the end, what’s most impressive about Lipps & McCain is that it exists at all. That it’s also both genuinely entertaining and impressively made is just extra bounty for the viewer.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 