Peter Weir takes up his interest in Culture Clash and sets it down in modern-day Pennsylvania, where the Amish community assumes the "primitive" role previously filled by Australian Aborigines. It is not necessary to know a people intimately in order to satisfy Weir's curiosity. The early scenes, of a horse-drawn buggy in automobile traffic and of a young Amish boy's first trip to the big city, maintain a nice wide-eyed quality, right up through the witnessed murder in the train-station men's room. But the thriller plot goes dead, or into a coma, almost as soon as it comes to life; and it only belatedly revives for a High Noon finale (with one of the villains dispatched by a method out of D.W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat). In the interim, a wounded Philadelphia policeman, hiding out in Mennonite country, instigates a cultural-exchange program in which City Slicker learns to milk a cow, and teaches Pretty Amish Widow to dance to Sam Cooke. And the inevitable question of what an Amish man will do when the local ruffian sticks an ice-cream cone on the end of his nose is answered, or rather dodged, by having the disguised policeman (in his "plain" clothes) step forward like Billy Jack and beat the bully to a pulp. So much for pacifist philosophy! With Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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