The Loveless (Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery, 1981)

Willem Dafoe in The Loveless

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Robert Gordon, Marin Kanter, J. Don Ferguson, Tina L'Hotsky, Lawrence Matarese, Danny Rosen, Phillip Kimbrough, Ken Call, Jane Berman. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery. Cinematography: Doyle Smith. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: Nancy Kanter. Music: Robert Gordon. 

If, as it's said to be, The Loveless is an homage to The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953), it's not a bad example of the truism that there's a thin line between homage and parody. It's hard not to laugh at the poses of its leather-clad 1950s-style bikers, saying things like "daddio" and "cool your jets." One of them is an up-and-coming Willem Dafoe, making his debut as a movie lead. It was also Kathryn Bigelow's debut as a feature-film director, and was made as her master's thesis in the film program at Columbia -- the university, not the studio. Both Dafoe and Bigelow, as they say, show promise. Though it's slow and somewhat overcooked, it demonstrates, among other things, Bigelow's eye for male posturing, which would serve her well in a later film like Point Break (1991). It was her co-director Monty Montgomery's one outing as a feature director; he's better known as a producer, working with among other, David Lynch. The Loveless is one of those movies that are less interesting in themselves than for the conditions and circumstances under which they were made and as the harbinger of better things for some of its personnel.