Filmmaker Jack Conrad has one of the most ruthlessly efficient filmographies one will see on IMDb. He has some unremarkable work editing and assisting a director, and then BAM! All of a sudden, in 1973, he’s writing, producing, directing, editing, and starring in Country Blue. Then it’s back into anonymity until he produced The Howling in 1980. Fin! He hasn’t been heard from since. Conrad went from being an auteur, to producing one of the most iconic horror flicks of the 1980s, and that’s it. There have been shorter film careers featured in Shitty Movie Sundays, but Conrad got a lot out of his cup of coffee.
Regional cinema in the United States is not dead. There are still filmmakers all over the country making movies outside of the Hollywood and New York systems, but the days of films made in a certain region for that region are over. Country Blue was made in the deep south, and it was never meant for anything other than the drive-in archipelago that once dotted the land from Brownsville, Texas to Beaufort County, North Carolina. If the movie just happened to be successful enough to make it into the drive-ins and grindhouses of the north, then that was a bonus. It’s a way of experiencing film that was unique to its time and place and while that may be gone, the films are still out there.
Conrad stars as Bobby Lee Dixon, recently paroled and back home in southern Georgia. There, he takes up his old job as a grease monkey at Jumpy Belk’s (Dub Taylor) garage, and rekindles a romance with Jumpy’s daughter, Ruthie (Rita George).
Bobby Lee is a restless sort. He wants to get out of town and take Ruthie with him, but the forty dollars a week he gets working in Jumpy’s garage does nothing more than tether him. So, the dark specter of recidivism appears, and Bobby Lee decides to return to a 
life of crime. Worse still, he makes Ruthie, despite her valid misgivings, his accomplice.
The two of them turn into b-movie Bonnie and Clyde, which was not uncommon in cinema at the time. Their first stop is a bank just across the state line in Havana, Florida. The robbery could have gone better, especially since only a token effort was made to conceal their identities, and Bobby Lee and Ruthie are on the run.
The vagaries of budget and shooting schedules meant there was no cross country crime spree on tap for these two. In fact, they rob the bank in Havana twice. But, it’s the charm that keeps us watching shitty movies, right?
Country Blue has b-movie bona fides galore. The plot is thin, as is the dialogue. The cast feels unrehearsed, to the point they step on each other’s lines, and only a small number of the cast can be considered professionals (most notably Taylor, and prolific That Guy David Huddleston as the bank president in Havana).
Then, there are scattered moments of filmmaking that approach the sublime. For one, Conrad and company picked the right time of year to film in the south. Everything is green and in bloom, contrasting with the slow decay of the small towns in which they filmed. There are lengthy establishing shots where audiences can soak up day to day main street life in Havana, before, again due to budget, viewers are treated to a bank robbery that looks as if it was shot in a broom closet.
This being a Bonnie and Clyde story, it was never going to end well for Bobby Lee and Ruthie. Conrad sets up a violent denouement, the antihero gets his comeuppance, and whether or not anyone survives the finale, I’ll let the reader discover.
Country Blue doesn’t ask any of the tough questions that films like this tend to cover. Sure, Bobby Lee is frustrated and manipulative, but Conrad’s portrayal doesn’t convey any deep inner conflict in the character. It was beyond his skills as an actor. That said, there is life in his direction. He did decent work polishing this turd, enough so that I wish he had been able to add to his oeuvre. Country Blue takes over the #215 spot in the Watchability Index from Truth or Dare. It’s worth a peek.