Butler's Cinema Scene

Sam Elliott

“THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT” My rating: B

98 minutes | No MPAA rating

When it comes to pulpy promise, it’s hard to beat a title like “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot.”

But what’s unsettling about this debut feature from writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski is the way it defies almost all audience expectations while giving us Sam Elliott in one of his greatest performances.

In fact, one cannot imagine “The Man Who Killed Hitler…” working without the presence of the 75-year-old Elliott, a white-haired warrior of such potent screen charisma that I would gladly watch him absentmindedly scratch his ass for 90 minutes.

We meet Calvin Barr in the late ’80s or early ’90s, occupying a bar stool in a tavern in the quaint Norman Rockwell-esque town he’s called his home for more than seven decades. Calvin is quiet and cryptic, a man who exudes a certain angst but would never talk about it.

Still, he’s obviously not your typical senior citizen.  He makes mincemeat of a trio of punks who try to hijack his car late one night.

The first 45 minutes of Krzykowski’s screenplay follow Calvin in both the present and the past, interspersing his unremarkable daily routine with flashbacks to his service in World War II. We see glimpses of young Calvin (Aiden Turner) being sent behind enemy lines disguised as a Nazi officer. His assignment is to put a bullet in Der Fuerher.

Other flashbacks take him to the pre-war years when he worked in a shop on Main Street and wooed a pretty school teacher (Caitlin FitzGerald); he was sent to war before they could wed or even consummate their affair. That loss will haunt him to his dying day.

Which could be soon. Forty-five minutes into the film our hero is paid a visit by a federal agent (Ron Livingston) who announces that Calvin’s country once again desperately needs his help.  It seems that an ever-widening area of  Canadian forest is being ravaged by a mysterious influenza that is being spread by none other than Bigfoot.

Blood tests have shown that Calvin is one of the few humans immune to the virus; now he’s being sent up North to stalk  the hairy creature: “If we cannot contain the beast, if we cannot destroy it and it escapes, this could be the end.”

I’ll say this about Krzykowski…whatever his talents as a filmmaker they are vastly surpassed by his abilities as a prognosticator.  Basically this film predicts the pandemic we’re now experiencing.

Aiden Turner

Initially Calvin turns down the assignment (“I don’t want to kill again, be it beast or man”), but he finally caves and is flown up to the wilderness area and an emergency military base where everyone else is wearing hazmat suits (he has viral immunity, remember). He’s  given his choice of weaponry and sent out to do battle.

One of the curious things about this film is that it actually downplays its exploitable elements.  I mean, yeah, Sam Elliott going one-on-one with Bigfoot is some kind of geek orgasm, but the film pays virtually no attention to the hunt, wrapping it all up in a matter of minutes.  (By the way, Bigfoot looks a lot like one of the hominids from “2002: A Space Odyssey,” only with saucerish Gollum eyes.)

“He doesn’t have big feet, either,” Calvin radios back to his handlers. “Isn’t really living up to his name.”

That’s a good example of the deadpan humor coursing through “The Man Who Killed Hitler…” Yet for all the weirdness of its setup, Krzykowski’s screenplay scrupulously avoids anything that smacks of camp.  He expects us to take this yarn seriously.

And that pays off in the movie’s final minutes, when Calvin returns to his little burg as a sort of ghostlike figure still mourning the love that got away. If the film never lives up to the gonzo prospects of its title, it delivers as a fascinating and weirdly compelling character study.

| Robert W. Butler