Anton Bitel | On 17, Jan 2025

Director: Francis Galluppi
Cast: Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Sierra McCormick, Nicholas Logan, Michael Abbott Jr, Barbara Crampton
Certificate: 15

The Last Stop in Yuma County will be released on Limited Edition Blu-ray from 17th February via Arrow Video.
 
In Arizona, Yuma is both a city and a county, but in a film title, the name is a shorthand evocation of a particular genre. For what Lesley Selander’s Fort Yuma (1955), Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957, and James Mangold’s 2007 remake), Georgio Ferroni’s Fort Yuma Gold (Per pochi dollari ancora, 1966), Romolo Guerreri’s Johnny Yuma (1966) and Ted Post’s telemovie Yuma (1971) all have in common, apart from that toponym in their title, is that they are all westerns. So from its very name, writer/director Francis Galluppi’s feature debut The Last Stop in Yuma County raises oater expectations, and in a sense it does not disappoint in delivering them. This is a frontier drama, where character and morality are tested amid tense standoffs and shootouts, and where outlaw attitudes prove infectious. Yet it also unfolds not during America’s pioneering history, but rather in the modern era.

Not too modern, mind. The setting is firmly the 1970s, a time when there were no computers, no internet, no wifi, no mobiles (although certainly brown rotary phones) – so that in a sense the situation offers its own frontierland somewhere between the settler past and America today. A travelling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) is on his way cross-country for the birthday of his estranged daughter Sarah in Carlsbad, California, and stops in at a filling station-cum-motel for gas, only to be told by the attendant Vernon (Faizon Love) that the pumps are empty, the delivery tanker is running late, and there is no other gas station for the next 100 miles. So the salesman settles down in the adjacent diner and proves less successful in pitching his Japanese kitchen knives to waitress/owner Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) than she is in pushing her signature rhubarb pie.

What follows, in this last desert refuge, is a heated convergence of folk passing through and hoping to move on, whose different intentions and ambitions will clash. There are the armed bank robbers Beau (Richard Brake) and Travis (Nicholas Logan), who will do anything to get away in someone else’s car with a full tank and their bag of cash. There are the young, dumb lovers Sybil (Sierra McCormick) and Miles (Ryan Masson), planning to be the next Bonnie and Clyde – or at least, as Miles insists with greater period relevance, “Kit and Holly… Badlands, baby.” Then there is the sweet old Houston couple Robert (Gene Jones) and Earline (Robin Bartlett), who despite their age, are harbingers of the future, revealing – if you listen carefully – that their ‘hippie’ grandson has just joined the ill-fated Branch Davidian cult in Waco (Jones himself is most famous for playing a Jim Jones-like cult leader in Ti West’s 2013 film The Sacrament). There is the nice younger couple, David (Sam Huntington) and Sarah (Alex Essoe), who are wholly invested in their newborn child, and there is Native American neighbour Pete (Jon Proudstar), who comes in regularly for a meal. The good-natured Deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) drops by briefly to get take-out coffees for himself, for Charlotte’s husband Sheriff Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.) and for the station’s receptionist Virginia (Barbara Crampton) – but he fails to notice the high tension in the place, or indeed the cut phone line.

“Better here,” says Vernon when asked by Travis how he gets around. “I got just about all I need.” For Vernon alone has no car, sleeps in the attached motel, and is content with his portable TV, with his deaf dog (who also seems pretty content), and with staying put and living within his modest means. Everyone else by contrast is on the move, hustling and bustling and pursuing their illusory American dreams elsewhere on the horizon. Yet all those aspirations of mobility will come into violent collision in this remote outpost. In the ensuing chaos (where everyone is packing), the anonymous salesman, expressly compared by Sybil to “that asshole from Psycho”, will, when push comes to shove, find out exactly who he is and what he is made of – even if he has only brought a knife to a gunfight.  

Perfectly mimicking the sights, sounds and cynicism of 70s cinema, Galluppi squeezes every inch of his film’s genre elements for their ethical juice, exposing a small – and rapidly dwindling – ensemble of random fellow travellers as either sorely deficient in their essential values, or else tragically caught in the crossfire of others’ greed and selfishness. A key moment towards the end of The Last Stop in Yuma County shows the Stars and Stripes flapping in the wind over the gas station. For this is, of course, an American story, revealing the arid, aggressive moral landscape not just of its own period of fuel shortages and armed adventurism, but also of today’s polarised America.

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