Double Exposure: Cutter’s Way/House M.D.

1981 neo-noir movie Cutter’s Way, recently screened at the IFI (yet again) has been forgotten, and it’s a half-deserved neglect. It’s not a great film, but it does showcase a superb performance from John Heard as the acerbic crippled Vietnam veteran Alexander Cutter. What’s startling is just how familiar his character is…

We first hear about Cutter thru Jeff Bridges’ character Richard Bone mentioning that he needs to buy some more medicines for him. Then we’re visually introduced to Cutter sitting in a bar making fun of people he’s just met, before saying something outrageously racist about one of them, and then compounding the problem when some guys who heard the remark start to circle. Bone gets him out of this, despite Cutter’s best attempts to get Bone dragged into the fight too, by excusing him on account of his leg… Cutter then yells at Bone that he needs more pills, and throws his cane after him, breaking a neon sign. The glorious off-screen shout “That’s going on your tab Cutter” confirms that this is just how Cutter rolls. The resonances with a certain drug-addled anti-social doctor and his drug-sourcing enabling friend don’t jump off the screen at this point, although they’re apparent later. What really puts the House comparison into your mind is when Bone delivers a drunken Cutter home to his long-suffering wife. She’s played by Lisa Eichorn who could well be Jennifer Morrison’s twin sister sent back in time so startling is the resemblance to House’s team-member Allison Cameron. As the film progresses you get the weird sensation that this is what would have happened if that date between House and Cameron at the end of season 1 went well. Cameron has sunk into alcoholic depression as she waits for House to forget about his leg and his misery and just start living again…

Such sentiments are reinforced by Cutter’s memorable arrival home in his car. Drunk as a skunk he first lurches to a halt splayed across the road. He’s not going to park it there, is he? Oh no, he’s going to ram his neighbour’s car, which is in the way, reverse, ram it again, reverse again, and park in his driveway, having destroyed his neighbour’s car in the process of shunting it into the correct driveway. Cutter stomps into his house, and announces he’s been picking up hitchhiker’s and saying how much fun they were, with one qualification; “Never orgy with a monkey, the little f—ers bite”. His wife points out that he has no car insurance, “That would be his problem”, and that his licence has expired, “Car runs just fine without it”, as Cutter changes into his old army jacket to go out and deal with the police the right way by talking about duty, appearing reasonable and apologetic, and getting away with everything because, as he quietly reminds the enraged neighbour (when the cop has left) by holding up his cane, “I’m a cripple”. Later Bone in exasperation at Cutter’s deranged scheme to blackmail a local millionaire they suspect of murder yells about how he doesn’t want another lecture by Cutter on “How you just see the world as it is, a crock of shit. And oh God, don’t start in on your leg…” Needless to say Bone, like Wilson, always ends up embroiled in his friend’s maddest plans despite his objections.

There are of course substantial differences between Alexander Cutter and Gregory House. Cutter is a soldier, not a doctor, and prone to adding physical violence to his cutting rhetoric. Waiting for a procrastinating Bone to make a blackmailing phone call Cutter whips out a hand-gun and shoots the target that Bone has been messing about with on the pier arcade to hurry things along, “Give the man his goddamn doll”. Cutter even strikes his wife when she questions his choice to wallow in misery. There’s even one weirdly prophetic anticipation of House’s recent move away from audience sympathy in this violence. Cutter’s demented hero moment in the closing frames as he rides a horse thru a garden party to crash thru the window of the evil tycoon could almost be the inspiration for the shark-jumping finale of House season 7. The resemblance to Cameron is accidental and hilarious, that to Wilson not overly pronounced but still present, but Cutter’s mixture of logical deductions that pin the crime on the millionaire and his biting remarks and refusal to obey any social contract all seem classically Houseian. So, did David Shore watch Cutter’s Way years before creating House and subconsciously remember aspects of a long-forgotten character, or is this just one of those weird moments where an idea seems to be floating around waiting for someone to use it, like discoveries in physics and astronomy that parallel researchers discovered simultaneously?

Probably the latter, but it sure makes for one hell of an entertaining and oblique way to view Cutter’s Way.