The Wild Boys –Part 264 – Hank Williams’ The Last Ride- A Film Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

The Last Ride, 2012

Live fast, die young, and make a good corpse is a mantra that Hank Williams’ who last ride before his premature death is the subject of the film under review, ah, called The Last Ride, lived by. Every generation, every niche cultural enclave has its iconic wild boys (thus far mainly wild boys, although if things even out the wild women, wild women in my sense, should not be far behind) who stirred the imagination, who made their devotees believe, believe that the moment had to be seized and shaken for what it was worth. Names like John Reed, Hemingway, the young Marlon Brando, James Dean, Jack Kerouac (and his mad band of associates, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs), Jim Morrison of The Doors, Hunter Thompson and so on. Not all of them died young as Hank William did, although not for not trying, but they all listened to their own drummer and left a cultural marker on the planet.

Of course Hank’s niche was new style (then new style –okay) country music that shifted the beat from slow mournful old timey Jimmy Rodgers back road and Carter Family mountain-etched music to more contemporary and personal concerns with a jump band as back up. My connection, my tenuous and rebellious connection, to Hank’s kind of music was hearing it waft through my growing up in the late1950s house in Hullsville south of Boston when my father, a son of Appalachia, would play or listen to old Hank and companions. I, a child of rock and roll insistent in listening to my own drummer, took a long time, a very long time to learn to appreciate Hank beyond my father’s hard rock-etched dreams.

All this above as prelude to the simple fact that as a late-comer I was not privy to a lot of Hank Williams’ life story and so rather let his music speak for him. So I was not aware until viewing this film about the manner of his death, although I had an inkling from reading liner notes on some of his CDs that he was another in that short line of wild boys who had to keep moving, had to keep pushing the envelope, had to live out there on edge city where the wild boys need to hang out.

So the plot here is not what drives this film, hell, the title says it all, it’s a cinematic recreation of Hank’s last ride but what drive it is the bonding between an essentially lonely, sick man (at only 29 so you know he sowed some serious wild oats) and the last man who saw him alive, his young hired for the occasion of getting him to his next concert chauffer. What drives this thing is the interplay between the two, between the country boy chauffer’s coming of age and Hank’s tumble into that die young good night. Most of the interchange done inside that big old Caddy that was a symbol that one had arrived in the big time in America. And that simple plot interplay worked whatever the cinematic licenses were taken about the actual facts of Brother Williams’ death. But see dying young for some guys (or gals) is only prelude, some sixty years later his songs like Cold, Cold Heart that I heard like I said almost from the cradle still sound fresh. And the soundtrack here has some very good material acting as backdrop as Hank moves to that last long lonely ride.