Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) Even if 1967 is generally regarded as the year that movies changed forever (finally moving past the Hays Code and embracing a more naturalistic style), you can see a steady evolution of American movies throughout the 1960s, from black-and-white to colour, and slowly tackling modern issues in increasingly frank fashion. While Bus Riley’s Back in Town is not an exceptional movie in any regard, you can use it as evidence of how things were changing. Here we have a young man (Michael Parks) coming back to his hometown after three years in the Navy, trying to reconnect but feeling more alienated than ever. As a small-town domestic drama, the stakes are low but the plot is character-driven, what with him being seduced by an ex-girlfriend (Ann-Margret, playing a bad girl) now married and bored, his unwillingness to settle for a good but boring job as a mechanic, and his lack of acknowledgement that things keep changing. I was drawn into the film by Ann-Margret’s name, but her mid-1960s screen persona is here used for clearly dramatic effect, as she incarnates the temptation and regression that the main character must move past. Bus Riley’s Back in Town is not spectacular, but it’s considerably more intriguing than I expected, and as a slice of small-town America in the mid-1960s, it’s far more credible than many wilder and better-known movies.