In the movie, he plays horse-thief Henry Moon who is first seen racing toward the Mexican border. Once safely across, a stubborn horse and bad luck contribute to Henry's capture by an unscrupulous posse that ignores international border laws. The fugitive soon finds himself sentenced to death but a loophole in the local law books permits his release if a woman from the town agrees to marry him. Unexpectedly, a young widow named Julia Tate steps forward at the very last moment and agrees to rescue Henry under one condition - he must secretly help work her gold mine.
Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, and Meryl Streep were among the actresses first considered for the part of Julia Tate, but Nicholson decided to take a chance on a virtually unknown New York actress named Mary Steenburgen. She was sitting in the casting office waiting room when Nicholson first encountered her. He noticed she didn't have a reading script, gave her one with three scenes marked off and arranged to read with her the following day. "By the time something like that happens," the actress stated (in a 1982 Rolling Stone Magazine interview by Lawrence Eisenberg), "you've had so many years of elation and disappointment that you begin to treat your heart very carefully. Earlier in the week, a job I'd been told I had in a television pilot was yanked out from under me and given to a blond with big boobs." The following day, Steenburgen's ten-minute read with Nicholson ended up lasting two hours. "When I left, I was so excited I screamed for thirty floors in the elevator of the Gulf & Western Building," Steenburgen recalled. The actress was then flown to Hollywood and auditioned on the Paramount lot. "Nobody could imagine what was happening in my mind not just in terms of work but life wise. I had no perspective. I didn't know if I was going to be an overnight international film star or back at the Magic Pan [where she worked as a waitress]." In the end, Steenburgen won the part and a London Times reporter who later visited the Goin' South set observed, "Finding Steenburgen was a sort of thing moviemakers used to do in the good old days of West Coast Dreams. A man could walk in, see a girl at a soda fountain, and put her on the screen."
In homage to the glory days of the Hollywood Western, Goin' South was filmed in Durango, Mexico at a favorite John Wayne location. The Duke loved the locale so much that his son had built a typical western town there out of adobe and would rent it out for Hollywood movies. With a few color and sign changes, the sets for the 1970 John Wayne film Chisum were repurposed for Goin' South.
According to author Patrick McGilligan in his biography, Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, the actor/director liked to maintain a family-style atmosphere on his set but comedian John "Belushi was one jarring note in the proceedings. On the one hand, Jack wanted to like the comedian, whose popularity was soaring. Belushi blustered and posed, but he was fundamentally sweet, the kind of guy Nicholson liked to take under his wing....However, Belushi had a short fuse. He made petty demands and fought with the Goin' South producers, especially Harold Schneider, whose job it was not to lose fights. The television comedian became progressively more sulky as filming dragged on and, partly in response to his behavior, his role seemed to shrink." By the end of production, Belushi had harsh words about his experience, stating "Jack treated me like sh*t on Goin' South. I hate him."
Nicholson had more serious problems to deal with during production, though, than appeasing John Belushi's demands. In McGilligan's biography of Jack, cinematographer Nestor Almendros revealed that Nicholson shot "more than 400,000 feet of negative. Often two cameras would film at the same time, so we had as many as forty takes of each shot, from every conceivable angle. Nicholson had three editors working at the same time on different Movieolas. When I visited him in Hollywood, one was editing the final shootout, another the love scene, the third the scenes in the mine. In Europe such excess would be unthinkable, and this is perhaps why films there are more individual, though less polished."
Although Goin' South was a labor of love for Nicholson, it fizzled at the box-office. Most critics attacked the film, but focused mostly on Nicholson's well-publicized drug proclivities which enraged him. In his own defense, he said, "No one extracts the serious plot from Goin' South." The actor went on to complain that his characters "were once all members of Quantrill's raiders, the original guerrilla warfare unit in America. And what do you do with those people once they're now home? The fact that this wasn't even touched on critically was disappointing to me. " But not every critic hated Goin' South. In his review of the film, Newsweek writer David Ansen said, "Droll, sweet-tempered and lackadaisical, it's a shaggy dog story with Nicholson playing the shaggy dog. It turns Western conventions on their heads not out of satirical anger but simply to charm the pants off the audience. And aided by the sumptuous photography of Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven [1978]) and Nicholson's delightfully cantankerous performance, it very nearly succeeds." If nothing else, this turn to broad comedy for Nicholson proved that he could do the slow burn, the double take, and the pratfall as well as any gifted screen comedian.
Producer: Harry Gittes, Harold Schneider
Director: Jack Nicholson
Screenplay: John Herman Shaner, Al Ramrus, Charles Shyer, Alan Mandel
Cinematography: Nestor Almendros
Film Editing: John Fitzgerald Beck
Art Direction: Agustin Ituarte
Music: Perry Botkin, Jr., Ken Lauber, Van Dyke Parks
Cast: Jack Nicholson (Henry Moon), Mary Steenburgen (Julia Tate), Christopher Lloyd (Towfield), John Belushi (Hector), Veronica Cartwright (Hermine), Danny DeVito (Hog).
C-109m. Letterboxed.
by Emily L. Rice
