Inside Moves (Goodmark Productions, Lionsgate, 1980)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on Turner Classic Movies last night (Sunday, July 2) at 8 for a couple of quite interesting movies, one relatively recent and one a “Silent Sunday Showcase.” The relatively recent one was Inside Moves, made in 1980 by director Richard Donner fresh off his mega-success with the first Christopher Reeve Superman. Donner was looking for something more intimate, more human-scaled, more down-to-earth, and he found it in a script he got offered by something called Goodmark Productions. It was based on a novel by Todd Walton, also called Inside Moves, and it starts out with a chilling scene in which the film’s central character, Roary (John Savage), leaps out of a 10th floor window in an obvious attempt at suicide, only his life is spared when he lands on the roof of a Pontiac car that happens to have been stopped just under the window from which he leaped. (In Walton’s original novel Roary was a Viet Nam War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but screenwriters Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson – who would later become a director himself, specializing in just these sorts of kitchen-sink romantic melodramas – changed that to avoid “typing” Savage in Viet Nam veteran roles after The Deer Hunter.) Once he gets out of the hospital after a month’s worth of surgeries, Roary starts hanging out at Max’s Bar, a local dive (the film is set in Oakland and references San Francisco and Marin County) whose owner, Max (Jack O’Leary), has run up $11,000 in debts and is about to lose the bar through foreclosure unless he can come up with the money.

Max’s has become a hangout for the walking wounded, including “Wings” (Harold Russell, in his first film since winning two Academy Awards for his role in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives); wheelchair-using “Stinky” (Bert Remsen, who was supposedly paralyzed on the set of the Andy Griffith vehicle No Time for Sergeants when a light fell on him; he later was able to stay in the movie business by reinventing himself as a casting director); blind Burt (Bill Henderson), who when called upon to deal during the guys’ incessant poker games just flings the cards out on the floor one by one; and the barkeep, Jerry Maxwell (David Morse), a promising young basketball player until a few years before, when he was in an accident that left his right leg shorter than his left. Jerry goes to Golden State Warriors games and heckles one of the team’s stars, Alvin Martin (Harold Sylvester), after the Warriors lose a close game by one point after Martin misses a last-minute shot. Alvin challenges Jerry to a half-court game at the gym where Alvin routinely works out, and to both his surprise and ours Jerry nearly beats the multi-million dollar NBA professional. Alvin offers to loan Jerry the money for the super-operation he needs to play again and also uses his influence, once Jerry has the surgery and recovers, to get Jerry a tryout with a semi-professional team. Love – or at least sex – also gets thrown into the mix via “bad girl” Anne (Amy Wright), who’s Roary’s sort-of girlfriend when she isn’t working as a prostitute to raise money to support her heroin habit; and “good girl” Louise (Diana Scarwid), who comes to work at Max’s as a waitress and eventually has a brief affair with Jerry even though she ultimately decides it’s Roary she really loves.

Certainly Inside Moves has a family resemblance to Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, both stories about walking-wounded people who bond over a dive bar they frequent, but it’s an oddly touching film despite its flaws. TCM showed it on a double bill with The Best Years of Our Lives as part of a month-long tribute to the depiction of disabled people in films, and the idea of pairing Harold Russell’s two feature films was an inspired one even though Russell, despite being very good in it, is pretty much an ensemble player in Inside Moves. Aside from having prosthetic arms that attached to his surviving elbows with a harness and hooks (The Best Years of Our Lives contained a quite moving sequence in which Russell’s character showed the woman who loved him how he had to attach the harness every morning, and William Wyler recalled his astonishment that fellow disabled veterans called Russell “one of the lucky ones” because he still had his elbows, and therefore he could use the harness and hooks to have some ability to manipulate objects), Russell has a striking resemblance to the older William Shatner. His performance here has a matter-of-fact air, and after the movie TCM’s guest hosts speculated on why Russell didn’t pursue more of an acting career. My husband Charles said Russell could surely have acted in radio dramas or doing voice-overs, where his physical appearance wouldn’t have mattered, but apparently Russell bought into the conventional Hollywood wisdom that opportunities for an armless actor would be limited and didn’t act again for 34 years.

Inside Moves is a fascinating movie even though parts of it were slow going; I particularly liked the scene in which a Black gang leader and thug named Lucius Porter (Tony Burton) shows up at Max’s after Roary has used a $10,000 inheritance from his mother to keep the bar in business. At first I thought he was part of a protection racket showing up to extort his usual “cut” from Max, but it turns out he’s picked up Roary’s old girlfriend Anne (ya remember Anne?) and he orders his thugs to beat up Roary. Later, after Jerry has realized his lifelong dream of being hired by the Golden State Warriors to play in the NBA, there’s a chilling scene in which the Max’s regulars are taking a bus trip to see his first pro game and the others literally have to carry Stinky onto the bus – a reminder of how hard it was for people in wheelchairs to get around a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 that, among other things, required that all buses come equipped with wheelchair lifts. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to take these things for granted! I also liked the two oblique references to Superman in the movie – the Superman-themed pinball machine in Max’s and the Superman logo on the bar’s wall – in-jokes hearkening back not only to Richard Donner’s direction of the first Christopher Reeve Superman (1978) but his being fired and replaced by Richard Lester on Superman II, which so traumatized him that in a DVD commentary on the release of Donner’s cut of Superman II he called Inside Moves "the smallest film I could do that was just very near and dear to me, at that point, and I felt this is going to take my mind totally off that."