Cutter's Way 4K 1981 Ultra HD 2160p

Vietnam War veteran and amputee Cutter is angry at the whole world. One night, his friend, the gigolo Bone, witnesses a local oil tycoon stuffing a girl’s body into a dumpster. Cutter seizes on his story: through the tycoon, he wants to take revenge on the entire society that has turned its back on him.

User Review

I was sitting by the window in a crowded room… Waiting, damn it, for my coffee and breaded mozzarella slices (I love breaded mozzarella) and, while waiting, I gazed through the swirling cigarette smoke at the screen, across which figures with moving lips moved, lending a cheaply elegant atmosphere of bohemian intellectualism to the noisy café, where you can’t hear a thing anyway, so art for art’s sake, pure contemplation, a triumph of phenomenology—welcome! We’ll dress up any old pig here with atmospheric decor as a doomed aesthete, when it’s cold and dark outside! Mumble, shout, cackle, and show off to some six-pack-wielding Muraks all you want, but right now there’s a poetry reading going on in the next room, hoo-la-la…

On the screen, too, there is cold and gloom; in the gray twilight, people with dreary, frozen faces silently part their lips, like fish behind an aquarium glass. This is noir. I don’t like noir. I recall that one astute author wrote in the 1950s that Americans reduce the psychological individual to the sum of social actions, the background of which is inscrutable, if it exists at all. Spot on. It’s a different story with neo-noir, which, for example, was filmed in America by Europeans who had fled far away from triumphant socialism—Polanski or Ivan Passer. Yes, Passer’s *The Way of Cutter*. Cutter is a bitter invalid, a sort of remnant of a man—or rather, of a world that no longer exists. He learned from his gigolo friend, Bown, that the latter supposedly saw oil tycoon Cord toss a girl with a twisted neck into the trash. And, having probably watched all sorts of giallo films where maniacs are slitting girls’ throats at every turn in secluded back alleys, and the investigation is handled by one of the witnesses, the cripple begins to insist. What else could a chatty, bitter invalid—inappropriately well-read for his tavern surroundings—insist on, if not that everything in the world can be explained by God’s mercy, except for the shell that robbed him of his arm, leg, and eye? And so, any theodicy goes to the dogs along with Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and on this vile little planet without God or meaning, in these cynical eighties, rich scoundrels rape and murder young girls with impunity, unless, of course, the hero intervenes. The problem is that it seems even two people like the fussy, foul-mouthed little runt Cutter and the half-beggar playboy Bone aren’t enough to make up even a single hero on a white horse. In fact, the fact that Katter pretends to be crazy and his lines are deliberately unintelligible to those around him, and the fact that Bone saw only a silhouette in the darkness—like news of a secret truth—already gradually evokes a sense of something very familiar. It is no coincidence that Cutter introduced his drinking buddies to Bone as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

So, the North American Hamlet is performing “The Mousetrap” at Korda’s restaurant, loudly describing in juicy detail how the murder took place. And justice for all! But, as far as we remember Shakespeare’s tragedy, the first victims of justice turn out to be the relatively innocent—Polonius, Ophelia, and those same Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. To avoid spoilers, we won’t compare the tragedy’s ending with the film’s ending. If, in the words of another intelligent person, “Hamlet” is a play about how Hamlet fails to kill Claudius, then Ivan Passer’s film is a film about cowardice, indifference, apathy, and meanness, where the focus is not on whether the true murderer is the influential old man Cord, but whether Bown and others connected to Cutter—and Cutter himself—are willing to at least try to stand up to a very real and very powerful evil. And, of course, in the film by Passer, who left Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation of 1968, the war that maimed Katter is not the implied Vietnam War; it is the Prague Spring, trampled underfoot by the major. For Kundera, for Passer, Forman, and other émigrés, the decision was significant: to continue the Don Quixote-like struggle or, having come to terms with defeat, to turn a blind eye to the historical atrocity committed by some powerful figures with the connivance of other powerful figures—the powerful are always in cahoots.

But they did bring me the mozzarella after all, and a poetry reading began in the neighboring hall. And the young guys in T-shirts featuring the executioner Che Guevara watched their aesthetic noir, while the scruffy, scrappy poet barely extricated himself from his own worthless jumble of words “for the few”—whatever! —definitely breaded!—to the delight of the young leftists from “Tsiolkovsky,” spouting Benjamins, Habermas, and other origami. And really—doesn’t it all amount to nothing?

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (93.6 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)

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