YOUR THREE MINUTES ARE UP (1973)
Your Three Minutes Are Up (Douglas N. Schwartz, 1973)
From the future creator of Baywatch came this early seventies road trip comedy that swerves into downer, darker territory by the last reel. Two unlikable friends - stuffy, office drone Charlie (Beau Bridges) and anything-for-a-laugh ladies man Michael (Rob Leibman) - yuk it up along the California coastline, maxing out their credit cards and destroying any goodwill offered to them by the hapless citizens that cross their paths. A mustachioed, pocket-protector-wearing and Alka seltzer downing Beau Bridges comes across - initially - as a traditional leading man of the period, a manque fraught with societal malaise unwilling to commit to bride-to-be Janet Margolin. Think Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Richard Benjamin in any late sixties/early seventies films, but mostly Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, or Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid. Ron Leibman’s combustible personality with frequent Jerry Lewis-esque mugging is Charlie’s ticket out, the two short on cash but not on ability to scheme their way into hotel rooms or massage parlors with available free-thinking women. Michael is a scammer on unemployment insurance at the outset, past thirty but wildly immature and prone to waking up later in the day thanks to nights of hard-drinking. Their hijinks are more than questionable: like masquerading as movie producers to pick up women and then stiff them with the bill when they refuse to do a non-existent nude scene in the fictitious film. Or, when they’re really down on their luck, they fake neck whiplash injuries for quick cash from an insurance adjuster. But the sour-tinged carousing comes crashing down in the end - Charlie’s everyman may be genuinely disturbed. Janet Margolin, Frank Perry’s find for David and Lisa (1962), is saddled with the buzzkill part as Charlie’s fiancee, eventually slamming the door on their relationship after finding the extent of Charlie’s dishonesty. The screenplay is by James Dixon, a Larry Cohen bit part regular who aspired to some writing credits around this time - he handles the novelization duty on Cohen’s It Lives Again (1978). Dixon puts in an appearance in the unemployment insurance office, flummoxed by the bureaucratic process. (Leibman does much of the same thing in his scene shortly after that with Kathleen Freeman.) Mark Lindsay, then pursuing a solo career following time spent with Paul Revere and the Raiders with the one-two-three album release of Arizona (1969), Silverbird (1970), You’ve Got a Friend (1971), provides two tracks but not from those records: It’s Only Me and Get a Hold of Yourself. Dennis Lambert co-writes them. The photography is by Stephen Katz, shortly after his sister Gloria’s film Messiah of Evil, which is maybe one of the most distinctive-looking horror movies of all time. As the Ford Motor Company sponsors the production, Charlie’s vehicle of choice is a 1972 yellow long-bodied Mustang, the model soon to be slimmed down by 1974 due to the energy crisis. The Norwegian Playboy playmate Sharon Johansen - Leibman’s first female conquest near the start of the picture - suggests where Schwartz’s career will be headed in the future.
Never released to home video, the uncut version may be available via grey market sources.
