- ESTRAGON:
- Why don’t you help me?
- VLADIMIR:
- Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He peers inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well?
- ESTRAGON:
- Nothing.
Pocket Money is a strange little film from 1972 with an impressive set of credentials: featuring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, screenplay by Terence Mallick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, Thin Red Line), support from Strother Martin, Wayne Rogers, Hector Elizondo, cinematography by László Kovács (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces), directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke).
Seminal Image: Paul Newman throwing a television set off one of the Westward Ho’s balconies (back when it was still a hotel) into the courtyard below:
The plot is practically non-existent but the movie serves well as a vehicle for Newman and Marvin’s scrappy but essentially clueless would-be entrepreneurs scrambling to make a few bucks. Nothing really happens. Maybe the Waiting for Godot of late-period Westerns?
This clip is as good an example as any…