Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken

Alright y’all…time for VHS of the Week. I’ve told this story before but imma tell it again real quick: in the summer of 1991 I made a promise with myself that I would see every single film released theatrically between Memorial Day Weekend and Labor Day Weekend. I was all grown up and feeling my independence, having already turned 12 years-old and whatnot. It was probably something like 40 movies, which would've cost approximately $240 in 1991 money…$60 less than I paid to go to one stupid Green Day concert last summer. Obviously there were quite a few obstacles that prevented me from achieving my goal: a weekly allowance-based income of $10…lack of a driver’s license/vehicle…self-righteous, conservative box office clerks that balked at selling a pre-teen child tickets to flicks like Jungle Fever and Body Parts. Still, I managed to get out to the cinema several times a week. This was the summer of T2 and Point Break, both of which I saw at least four times. Shit, I can’t remember the last time I saw the same film in the theater more than once (maybe Titanic?? Everyone was doing it!!). Shit, I can’t remember the last time I saw ONE movie in the theater (maybe Megalopolis? More on that never).

There were five films released on Friday May 24th and I was gonna make good and goddamn sure I saw all of them before school started again on Tuesday. I had a fleetingly willing co-conspirator in my 81 year-old great-grandfather Fred, who brought me to Hudson Hawk Friday night followed by a matinee of Thelma & Louise Saturday afternoon. Hudson Hawk was bunk but I thought T&L was a stone cold classic. Fred couldn’t understand why they’d make “a picture about a couple of dizzy broads.” (the guy was born in 1910…it was totally OK to talk like that back then). I saw John Candy’s Only the Lonely Sunday afternoon and then it was on to Backdraft with my pops later that night. That left just one film remaining on my Memorial Day Weekend checklist: the G-rated Disney flick with way too many words in its title, Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken. To say I was less than enthused about this entry would be an understatement. Not because it was about teen girls and (checks notes) horse diving (??) but because of the G rating. I tended to prefer a hard R at that age. Psychosexual thrillers and such. You can’t even cuss in a G…not once! But I was pretty bent on being the only kid in my 7th grade class who saw five friggin’ movies over the weekend…an achievement that would surely impress between few to none of my classmates. So I stuffed poor Fred into his 1979 Ford Zephyr and off we went to the 1 PM show of Wild Hearts at the White City Triplex. See kids…but when we showed up, the lady selling the tickets was like “ahhh…yeah…so…nobody’s here to see that movie” and I was like “OH! What am I? A friggin’ mirage??” I didn’t really say that. What really happened was: Fred raised his arms all “praise the lord Jesus…let’s go to Friendly’s and get a Fishamajig sandwich!” But the lady offered us two tickets to see FX2 gratis. “But…but…I haven’t even seen one FX!” I stammered. And you know what? I still haven’t…but I LOVED FX2. Loved it! Brought my dad to see it the following weekend. It’s a real damn shame the Brian’s didn’t become an action movie franchise. “Brian Denehey and Bryan Brown are at it again…in Sleepwalk to Murder!!!” Rest in power, B Denehey….

It turns out that I wouldn’t get around to watching Wild Hearts Can’t be Broken for a long time. Like…34 years long. I finally pulled a VHS copy from the thrift store this week..and what happens is this: We open with a disclaimer that what we are about to watch is a true life story about a girl who followed her dreams. If they are anything like my dreams there’s going to be a lot of loose teeth and unintentional public nudity…so we’ll have to see. There’s an old timey newsreel featuring America’s 42nd favorite president Herbert Hoover explaining that the country is in a depression and that times are depressed. I typed Herbert Hoover into Google and the first thing that came up was “was Herbert Hoover a cross-dresser”...which is not something that people say anymore. (Answer: no…but J Edgar Hoover was). Anyway, we meet young Sonora Webster Carver (played by the star of Tom Petty’s Into the Great Wide Open video Gabrielle Anwar), who narrates the movie when she feels like it. She tells us she lives in a poor house in the poor part of Waycross, Georgia...even though her accent can best be described as “British actor trying to sound American.” We know she is wild at heart and weird on top because she grabs a pair of household shears and gives herself a bob right there in the opening scene! Her Mawmaw is bullshit and makes her wear a bag over her head like the killer from The Town That Feared Sundown. So Sonora is walking to school looking like the Unknown Comic when she stops by the local horse and cow field to pet her horse. Her classmates, who range in age from 8 to 25, stop her and bully the ever-loving shit out of her. They double dog dare her to jump her horse over a 3 foot fence. She’s not into it at all but punishment for rejecting double dog dares is death by firing squad so Sonora saddles up. The horse takes off cookin’ but catches a hoof on the top beam, tearing it off and sending Sonora hurtling toward the ground. She was inches away from a C2 fracture. The girls point and laugh. The town’s entire bovine population gets loose through the busted fence. 86 cheeseburgers.

Later at the town’s one-room schoolhouse the mean girls keep clowning on Sonora. So what does she do..the wild and crazy so and so?? She stands up and punches the ringleader right in the fuckin’ face. Cold cocked! Patow!! The teacher is all ho-lee-shit you are so suspended go to the principal’s lean-to immediately! Sonora wraps her ankles around the legs of her desk, which apparently prevents anyone from forcibly removing her from said desk. The teacher simply instructs the rest of the students to treat Sonora as if she does not exist…so that’s what they do. I mean..she DID clock a bitch. After school, Sonora and her little sister stop at the local general store to thumb through copies of the Evening Post when she sees a Help Wanted ad for something called Horse Diving, a heroically barbaric carnival event that I had never heard of before watching this movie…but that people were still trying to pull off as recently as 2012. More on that soon! When Sonora gets home her mamaw is ripshit about the suspension and the decimation of the town’s cow supply. Dude, how did her mom already know this?? It’s 1932…did the school email her about the suspension?? So what does Mamaw do? She punches Sonora right in the grill! We are 5 minutes into this movie and it’s already more violent than T2 and Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man…COMBINED! This a hard G, this flick! Mamaw says she never shoulda adopted her. Ahh…so that explains the lack of a southern accent! Later that night Mamaw says she’s gonna return her like a rancid milkshake from the soda fountain. Sonora says “well whatever then…at least I’ll have my biological little sister by my side” but Mamaw says “yeah sucks about that: we are keeping your little sister. You will never see her again.” Man…this Sonora girl’s day suuuuuucccckkks!!!!! And I’m realizing I’m gonna have that “Shake Senora” song in my head every time they say this goddamn girl’s name and am not too thrilled about it, TBH.

Before she can be turned over to the local lawrrr, Sonora decides to pull up stakes and peace out in the middle of the night. She leaves with nary a hobo stick and takes the heel-toe express to the nearest carnival, where kiddos are running around with Confederate flags and shit. Eeeeee….ok then. She meets a non-threatening hot dog-hawking redheaded boy named Clifford who is about her age and who I assume will become her love interest (note: I am wrong. Quite). Gingerman points her to Doc Carver, the old man in charge of the Horse Diving program. Doc Carver is played by the Oscar winning actor Cliff Robertson and looks like Lemmy from Motorhead if he got dressed up for a Civil War reenactment. He’s got a gray mullet and an unfortunate mustache and leather bracelets that go from wrist to elbow. He’d be quite a hit at an elderly leather daddy bar…just sayin’. (Note: Doc Carver was apparently an actual doctor…of the teeth. We call them dentists now). Sonora tells Doc that she wants to dive horses but the old man tells her to piss off. He’s already got a glammy diva horse diver named Marie and one can only dive so many horses (right??). Here we meet the Doc’s dreamy son, Al…who is totally that hunky disappeared actor from Sixteen Candles whom everyone erroneously thinks is Matt Dillon…Michael Schoeffling. You know how many movies that handsome slab of concrete has made since this one? Zero. This was his swan song. He hasn’t appeared in public since (i mean…I’m sure he appears in PUBLIC public…like at his local Whole Foods and shit…just not at the Vision Quest booth at the Comic Cons).

We also get a peek at this horse diving…and it consists of the following: a horse runs up a steep, narrow ramp blissfully unaware of what lay ahead of him/her/them. At the top, a female lady lies in wait. When the horse reaches the summit the lady grabs the reins and climbs aboard before the poor motherfucking horse unexpectedly (to the horse) runs out of ramp and plummets 60 feet FACE FIRST into a makeshift pond, splashing the delighted spectators with rancid shitwater. It’s like that amusement park log ride but with one passenger and a real live horse. Apparently no horses were ever killed during this event but I’ll bet a shitload of collar bones were broken.

Sonora refuses to take no for an answer and is eventually invited to live on Doc Carver’s sprawling farmhouse with the 4 other cast members of this movie. As soon as they arrive, handsome Al shows up with a feral white horse that he won in a poker game. Sonora takes a real shine to the horse and decides to name it Lightning. Al and Sonora also start to give each other sexual eyes and I start to get REALLY uncomfortable because isn’t this girl supposed to be in the 8th grade or something? I took out my phone and did a little Googling and found out the following: When this film was shot Michael Schoeffeling was 30 and Gabrielle Anwar was 20…so…all good there…kind of. (Note: Schoeffling having sex with Winona Ryder’s 15 year-old character in Mermaids? Still very much not OK. Maybe the dude smelled 2017 on the wind and cancelled himself). The events of this movie actually occurred in the late 1920’s…when Sonora was over 25 and when Cal Coolidge was president (not sure why we needed that Herbert Hoover cameo then). The real Sonora was still alive when this movie came out…and she thought it sucked. So there’s that! Here I also need to point out that this film was directed by a cat named Steve Miner, who is the only person to have directed TWO Friday the 13th films (parts 2 & 3-D). In 1999 I was working as an intern for a company that had optioned a screenplay called Frailty that they were having trouble attaching a director to. I immediately thought of Miner, who was kind of a journeyman but who had directed the cult classic House as well as Lake Placid, which was a sleeper B-movie hit that summer. I personally sent the screenplay and made the follow-up call and was told the following by his assistant: “Sorry, Steve is no longer interested in making violent films.” Steve Miner’s next directorial credit after that phone call: a remake of Day of the Dead. So there you have it: Steve Miner is a fucking liar.

Anyway…right…so Sonora hangs around the Carver spread for what feels like years, trying to learn how to jump on a horse while it is already in motion. Someone must’ve taken her out to a Banana Republic at some point too ‘cuz she’s suddenly a fashionista…wearing a colorful array of different berets and such. She and Al continue to flirt it up hardcore. She tells him that she dreams of one day diving horses in Atlantic City. He tells her that he dreams that one day people will stop mistaking him for Matt Dillon. One day while swimming in the world’s gnarliest swamp they finally suck face, so that’s great. But later that day Al gets super pissed at his old man for being so hard on Sonora so the old man punches his son right in the moneymaker, sending him through a wooden fence, which is less great. Again…SO MUCH fist-to-face violence in this children’s flick! Al picks up a busted piece of the fence and offers to crack the old man’s skull open but opts to leave the movie instead. Good call, bro. He writes Sonora a letter every single day, which was the 1920’s version of sliding into one’s DM’s (U Up??)...but Dr Carver burns every last letter ‘cuz he’s a vindictive sonafabitch.

After 10 years of training, Marie dislocates her shoulder before a big diving event (the first since this movie began like 3 hours ago) so Sonora finally gets the nod. She asks Doc Carver if he will still love her if she messes up. He says he will not, no. The day of the big event arrives and Sonora successfully jumps Lightning 7 stories into a puddle below. This movie was obviously shot before CGI so I have no idea how they filmed these falling horses. They look fake but…not that fake?? Sonora is happy but the horse is pissed…as is Marie, who quits the movie in a huff. Sonora figures her diving career is SET but then we see a Depression newsreel. People can’t afford to buy milk let alone tickets to see horse torture. Sonora and Doc Carver hang around the farm doing fuck all. One day he tells her he has to go on walkabout and to make sure nothing happens while he’s gone so of course shit goes sideways immediately. First Lightning comes down with a mystery ailment. Maybe a case of dontmakemediveheadfirstintoapuddle itis?? She lies with the horse and wails and OH SHIT…Handsome Al returns!! He diagnoses the horse as having eaten some moldy hay so it’s all good in the hood! He tells Sonora about his daily letter writing habit and she’s like “I received approximately zero of those letters…what did they say?” His answer: stuff.

So all is temporarily well and good. Doc Carver returns and makes a tenuous truce with his face punch’d son and the son, in turn, announces that he’s secured Sonora a contract to jump horses in Atlantic City for 6 whole months. Trump Taj Mahal here they come! On the way to the Dirty Jerz the crew stops for a little roadside picnic, during which Doc Carver wanders over to a local tree and promptly drops the fuck dead. They have a real smart sepia-toned funeral for him the very next scene. They threw that together awfully fast, you ask me. Speaking of asking me: it’s at this point…with some 15 minutes left in the movie…that my roommate/ex girlfriend wanders into the room and asks me if the big twist has happened yet…which confuses the shit out of me. This has been a pretty low stakes movie so far. I just assume Sonora will go to AC and win some competition. How could there possibly be a TWIST!? Does the movie actually take place in outer space? Is the horse actually the ghost of Bruce Willis??

When they get to AC, Al has to take over emceeing duties from his dear departed carnie barker father…and he absolutely sucks at it. He’s all wooden with the effect of an Alfa Romeo salesman. I see I wrote “cultural appropriation” in my notes during this scene but I have no recollection as to what that was about. I believe it, yo. When the hour of the big show arrives, Sonora starts walking the plank but there’s a problem. Lightning still has ringworm or whatever so she has to dive with a horse named Red Lips. Also–Al unexpectedly proposes to her in front of the crowd , even though he hasn’t bought a ring. Smooth move, Ex-Lax. Substitute Horse runs up the ramp all janky-like and gets spooked by a cymbal crash from the marching band below right before the dive. So…instead of diving…the horse just kinda falls. According to Wikipedia: “...not expecting it…Sonora has her eyes open as they land in the pool.” Dude…not expecting WHAT!? The horse is going into the drink one way or another, amirite?? She pops right up from the water after the fall but her vision is blurry, which is bad. The next morning she progressed to total blindness, which is worse. The local opto explains that the pressure of her open-eyed fall detached BOTH of her retinas and that she’ll never see again…which would turn out to be a blessing 60 years later when this shitty movie came out. Isn’t this also the plot to that skating movie Ice Castles?? I need to find that one. Here I’d like to mention that Gabrielle Anwar is the actress who does that one-off tango with Al Pacino’s blind character in Scent of a Woman. I feel like there should be more to say about that but there just isn't.

Ok so that’s the big “twist.” Sonora is blind and is gonna have a honey of a time completing her 6 month contract. Anwar doesn’t even try to act blind. She just walks around banging into shit and looking directly at whoever is speaking to her. She begs Al to let her continue jumping horse but she can’t seem to saddle up. Meanwhile that innocuous redheaded kid who has been lingering in the background of the movie has figured out how to drive his motorcycle in loops in a metal cage like Ryan Gosling in that one flick. Good on him. Al starts to insinuate that he isn’t terribly interested in having a blind wife and re-hires Marie to do the horse diving. On the day of her big re-debut a series of completely nonsensical, untrue events occur. Blind Sonora sits in the crowd with a bathing suit hidden under her civvies. Redheaded kid imprisons Marie and lets Lightning loose. The stables don’t appear to be anywhere near the seaside horse amphitheater, but this magical beast somehow knows that he/she/they needs to gallup into the arena and run the plank. Sonora peels off her clothes and blindly fumbles her way up the ramp. She grabs ahold of Lightning (“when there’s lightning…you know it always brings me down”–Ronnie James Dio)..and completes the jump with perfection. Freeze Frame. Sonora starts narrating again for the first time since forever to tell us that she kept blind diving for years and that she and Al lived happily ever after. Speaking of this movie, the real Sonora said: “the only thing true in (the movie) was that I rode diving horses, I went blind, and I continued to ride for another 11 years.” So what? So let’s dance! The end

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