The Last Stop in Yuma County
“Last Stop in Yuma County” is the kind of movie where you root for the worst to happen, because every escalation of misfortune makes things more entertaining.
Written and directed by Francis Galluppi, “Yuma” is a period piece that makes the most of a small budget. It’s set in the Arizona desert, roughly fifty years ago. Much of the action occurs in and around a diner and its adjacent gas station. The owner, a lumbering but sweet-souled man named Vernon (Faizon Love), tells travelers that the next station is four hours away, so it behooves them to fill up while they can. But the pumps are empty, and the fuel truck is behind schedule, so anyone who doesn’t have enough gas in the tank to keep going must sit in the diner and wait. The central air isn’t working. The place is a hotbox. Tempers tend to flare in a place like this.
Our entry into the story is a knife salesman, listed in the credits simply as The Knife Salesman (Jim Cummings). He seems anxious and depressed before he’s even opened his mouth. He wants to get to Calabasas, California, to visit his daughter, who is living with her mom and mom’s second husband. His waitress is Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), a smart, sweet lady who keeps urging patrons to try the rhubarb pie. Charlotte is married to Sheriff Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.), who dropped her off at work that morning.
The Knife Salesman and Charlotte bond immediately, but their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of two more customers, Travis and Beau (Richard Brake and Nicolas Logan), perpetrators of a bank robbery that’s all over the news. They’re surly and menacing. They stare. Sometimes they glower. Travis is smug and cold and has an insinuating, at times invasive way of speaking. Beau is an impulsive meathead who chain-smokes and wipes his armpits with napkins. Eventually, somebody’s going to identify these two.
As “Yuma” goes along, it adds more characters and … what’s the word I’m looking for here? Not levels. The movie stays at one level (thumbscrew-tightening comedy-thriller), and that’s fine because few American films know how to operate that way, and it’s a treat to see one that does. Maybe “trajectories” is the word. All these characters are going somewhere, if only in their minds. Their pit stop at the diner interrupts their momentum, then traps them in a limbo that becomes a purgatory and ultimately a hell on earth. (The movie could’ve been titled “The Fuelman Cometh.”)
