Don't listen to the negative reviews

Don't Believe the Hype

A Masterpiece!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Dinah Hunter (Yvette Mimieux) is traveling cross country from California to New York. In the deep south she unwisely picks up two hitchhikers. They hold her up and take her car leaving her all alone. She goes to a bar to use a phone. The bartender tries to attack her but she fights him off. Then a policeman wanders in and the bartender accuses her of attacking him! She's hauled off to jail and locked up. Then she's brutally raped but kills the man who did it. With the help of a fellow prisoner (Tommy Lee Jones) she escapes and they're both on the run.What sounds like a typical exploitation picture is surprisingly not bad. Aside from the rape scene (which is downright disgusting) this is pretty tame. There's next to no nudity (Mimieux briefly bares her breast) and it has a good script. This has been praised as a feminist picture. I don't agree. Sure she fights back and kills the man who rapes her but so do other woman in other exploitation films. Also she almost immediately falls in love with Jones and clings to him to save her. That's hardly feminist. The film also has plenty of shoot outs and car chases and Mimieux and Jones are very good in their roles. So it's worth seeing but a little overpraised and not a feminist film at all.

Fundamentally "Jackson County Jail" has all the makings of a crass exploitation picture but is, in fact, a hard-hitting pro-feminist expose of American mores. It also gives that fine and underrated actress Yvette Mimieux one of her best roles as a young businesswoman whose drive across America turns into a nightmare that begins when her car is hi-jacked and goes all the way downhill from there to rape and murder. Of course, whether the audiences of the day caught the film's underlying message or just enjoyed the blatant sex and violence is a different matter but it has certainly built up something of a cult reputation and is well worth seeing.

The best thing this movie has to offer is checking out Yvette Mimieux bare-chested. I cannot believe anyone could otherwise like this film. Shallow, predictable plot, VERY poorly acted bad-ole-good-ole-boys film that never misses a cliché. I would never have viewed it but for some stills from the jail scene of Mimieux. She really lowers herself from the pedestal I'd put her on in "The Time Machine." Weena, where have you gone? ;- (And how did they get so many otherwise worthy actors? I hardly recognized Tommy Lee Jones and Carradine. As for Howard Hesseman and Betty White, where have their standards gone? I could understand it if it was a first film for these guys - it's as if a director put a gun to the actors' heads, threw up the script and gave them one reading and on to the next scene.And is it possible to get a worse soundtrack? This movie has cheap written all over it. I'm going to do vidcaps of Yvette in the jail scene and toss this thing before it festers and affects others.

I thought the film was good with fine acting coming from the stars : Yvette Mimieux and Tommy Lee Jones. Jones is in his first major movie of his career and performed well. The jail house rape of Yvette is very graphic and I doubt if any other movie will show such a powerful scene unless you see "Two Women" again where the Italian Star is similarly abused.Perhaps the scenes showing Jones in a gun battle with the local police was not too realistic as it might have been but overall I believe the story rang fairly true to life and regret that it had to be placed in the area that presented the law as having such men who would take advantage of a good looking blond woman in distress. The truth is that such things do happen and if nothing else the movie reminds us all that while it is good to try to help strangers in need,it is not wise to pick up hitchhikers.