Bronco Billy

Cowboys and clowns, as the song goes, "everybody's hero... for just a little while." Classic gallantry is a state of mind, a self-willed illusion, thus Bronco Billy's Wild West Show and the "little pardners" in the peanut gallery, Clint Eastwood's beautiful précis. "The quickest hombre this side of the Pecos" is a former shoe salesman from New Jersey, the fabricated buckaroo leading a troupe of Midwest saltimbanques in a comic pendant to The Outlaw Josey Wales. The unlicensed doctor (Scatman Crothers), the Vietnam War deserter (Sam Bottoms), the hook-handed embezzler (Bill McKinney) and the Apache couple (Dan Vadis, Sierra Pecheur), outcasts reenacting archetypes under the big top, sticking together by the fragile fabric of mythology. Into the makeshift community drops the scoffing heiress (Sondra Locke) out of It Happened One Night, a grudging assistant to the trick-shooting boss after she's left behind by her husband (Geoffrey Lewis). "You're living in a dream world!" A caustic cabaret for the Seventies (Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson), for the Eighties a fond revue, always the chasm between reality and self-image. The superstar as humble ringmaster, a reflexive analysis by Eastwood of the towering cornball who can shoot like Dirty Harry when outlaws smash a little boy's piggy bank. (Away from the limelight, the spell is broken: The wannabe train robber can't quite reach the caboose, the quick-draw desperado must grovel before the corrupt sheriff.) Ford's show people in the wilderness (Wagon Master), a stop at the orphanage to point up the debt to La Strada. Theater into cinema into life, as pure as Chaplin. "Are you for real?" "I am who I want to be." The sublime punchline dissolves from the curtain call to an aerial view of the circus tent stitched from Old Glories, Whitman's "national institution" and then some. With Walter Barnes, Beverlee McKinsey, Woodrow Parfrey, William Prince, Douglas McGrath, Tessa Richarde, and Hank Worden.