A hippie musician is given 72 hours to unload 500 kilos of grass on various funky acquaintances throughout the Los Angeles metroplex. Cisco Pike, you say? Nope. This is Panama Red, the second film from director Bob Chinn’s Pantheon Pictures and the only film on the filmmaker’s resume that was awarded a PG rating from the MPAA.
Given that writer and director Bill W. Norton was a friend of Bob Chinn’s from their days at UCLA in the early to mid sixties, there is little doubt that Cisco Pike, Norton’s debut film for Columbia Pictures (which gave Kris Kristofferson his first feature role and got a heavy, uncredited lift by writer Robert Towne), was an influence on Panama Red, either consciously or unconsciously. But, though similar in terms of overall story, Panama Red is to Cisco Pike what the Faces were to the Rolling Stones. There’s definitely a kinship and a dialed-down, drive-in similarity between the two but the character intimacy afforded by Chinn and his loose production of regulars makes it feel far friendlier and less opaque. And, unlike Cisco Pike where the protagonist is forced into his dope-selling situation by a crooked cop which compounds Cisco’s existential crisis of self-worth in a corrupt and shifting world, the main conceit of selling the weed in Panama Red comes off like good old fashioned blue collar despair (and, if I’m being honest here, all of the characters in Cisco Pike are so uptight, dour, and stoic, it’s hard to believe that they actually smoke the pot that they buy and sell).
In Panama Red, Randy Bates (Jim Wingert) is beset by relatable struggles as he’s completely broke and his wife, Barbara (Barbara Mills), is VERY pregnant. Meanwhile, his music career has gone mostly nowhere and the only regular audience he gets is the repo man who is always on the horizon and looking to hook Randy’s Econoline van. So our hero needs money and he needs it fast. Coincidentally, so does Marchaud, aka “Money Man” (Alain Patrick) who is stretching some cash to secure a stock deal and, in order to have the time to raise the necessary funds, takes advantage of the weekend delay at the bank to offload a giant shipment of Panama Reed. Enter Randy who subcontracts through his network of friends and raises the funds on the street, kilo by kilo and lid by lid.
Another interesting comparison Panama Red makes with Cisco Pike is the one that comes from the point of view of their filmmakers. For Bill Norton, the dramatic presence of a heavy legal authority looms large and is very imposing throughout his film. For Chinn, the cops, FBI, and BNDD agents are far softer and are mostly ineffective. Since this is a movie about selling marijuana, there are definitely dramatic stakes, but they always feel pretty low as there is never one moment the audience thinks that Randy won’t accomplish his goal (and Marchaud is a pretty laid back dude so Randy never feels like he’s much in a squeeze). In Cisco Pike, the protagonist is the anti-authoritarian who is always on the precipice of going to jail. In Panama Red, it was the filmmaker himself who, up to that point, worked a trade that could have landed him in the slammer. So a west coast romp about some harmless pot slinging was probably a chance to let the air of out the tire as it related to the very real legal peril Chinn was always in danger of being in while plying his own trade. You think selling weed draws heat? Try shooting dirty movies in early 70’s Los Angeles.
Panama Red is definitely lacquered in a loose hippie vibe. Its kind of spirit may be just slightly long in the tooth for 1973 but this is a film being made by people who are still living a more free-spirited lifestyle so it died a little harder with porn people than with everyone else. That said, the film’s style and flavor was positively stale by the time the film was sold to American Films, Ltd in 1975 who then saddled it with a verbose trailer molded after Russ Meyer’s Supervixens and (barely) released it in 1976. But even if it’s holding fast to a “hey, man” attitude, Panama Red shows that for every cinematic Baby Boomer that had the wanderlust and detachment of Cisco Pike (or even Jack Nicholson’s Robert Dupea in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces), there were more than a few who took their responsibilities seriously, and this movie is a sweet pitch to folks who toil in a black market economy who, at the end of the day, are just trying to make a living and raise a family. In that sense, its micro-budgeted look at blue collar, domesticated hippies shares some DNA with Eggshells, Tobe Hooper’s debut film from 1969. But there is also a kinship to Alain Patrick and Chinn’s Blue Money as Randy and Barbara aren’t that far removed from Jim and Barbara De Salle (who was also played by Barbara Mills), another upstart couple looking to hatch a fairy tale-like escape from the grind of their day-to-day life.
It’s not a musical, per se, but Panama Red is studded with great tunes written and performed by Wingert, who had previously furnished the tunes for 1972’s Evil Come, Evil Go. Though I’ll cop to “The Laughing Song” being something that should be tossed into the sea, it’s worth the inclusion as it’s run over a long-playing gag of John Holmes being stripped of a copious amount of contraband as he’s booked into the El Segundo jail by Jack Morgan, Chinn’s then attorney who eventually became a judge and was appointed to California’s superior court by Pete Wilson in 1994.
As Marchaud’s secretary/chauffeur and a prolific dealer, respectively, Rene Bond and John Holmes make fun, family-friendly appearances as does the mighty, mighty Sandy Dempsey in her last turn in a Chinn film. Her role as Judy, the maid to Randy’s turned-on mother-in-law, seems to be at least something of an in-joke as this would be the only Chinn picture in which Sandy Dempsey stays (mostly) chaste. Chinn associate and buddy Walt Davis is hilarious as a rich, uptight buyer whose skin crawls at the indignity of slumming it for weed. But save and except John Holmes, Panama Red was pretty much the last hurrah for a lot of these folks in terms of Bob Chinn’s cinematic path. Patrick made one last appearance the following year in The The Love Slaves but, like George Romero’s Knightriders, this is a big fun send off to the troupe. Without any context, it’s a shaggy drive-in, sugar pop weed comedy. But it gains a certain kind of wistful resonance when watching it as Chinn’s big rally to make a mainstream feature with so many familiar characters in his orbit showing up in some capacity either in front of or behind the camera.
For Panama Red, Chinn lucked out as the 16mm Agfacrome reversal stock used to shoot the film was on the house. After Chinn had shot some test footage on the stock and liked what he saw, producer Linda Adrain contacted the Agfa-Gevaert Film Company about shooting an entire feature on it and, for their efforts, they were sent 20 rolls for the amazing low price of $0. Due to the fact that this was the one and only feature shot on the stock, a pristine print of Panama Red (struck from the original camera negative, mind you) sits in the library of USC for posterity and, apparently, is as fiercely defended by its custodians in the same manner afforded to the hand-written memoirs of Walter P. Thatcher. How did USC come into ownership of this relic? They got it from Superior Court Judge Jack Morgan’s collection of 16mm prints, gifted to the university by his wife after his passing. The print itself had been given to Morgan by Chinn out of his own collection of his films. And now it’s all locked up.
To this day, no release prints of Panama Red have ever been located and the only copy in circulation is a rip from an ancient and worn VHS copy that is festooned with hard-coded Turkish subtitles. Strangely, a high quality version of the film’s trailer can be seen on YouTube which gives you an idea of how glorious this film would look if someone could dislodge that print from the clutches USC long enough to get a high quality scan of it. If anyone is up for a Jean Pierre Melville-inspired heist to accomplish this goal, shoot me an email. Because, regardless of its barely-existent reputation, Panama Red is better than the treatment it’s been given. It might be something of a lark but it’s an entertaining one. And, honestly, for a movie about peddling dope that was made by people who usually made adult films, it’s a pretty wholesome one, too.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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