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It opens with a lingering intimation of Mann (riverbed consumed with sunlight, the corpse caught in the fishing line drifting down the stream), then settles into a melancholy reading of Ulmer's The Naked Dawn. The saddle tramp (Peter Fonda) is weary of wondering, calls off the trek to California, pines for home. "Home," sighs the fellow rambler (Warren Oates). "Maybe there ain't no such color." The farm he left behind a decade earlier is still there but the wife (Verna Bloom) has taken to calling herself a widow, the men can only stay as hired help. Bloom is authentic frontier-gal material, hard and stoic yet mysteriously erotic while sitting on a porch rocker and recounting her previous dalliances with workers: "It was all right at the time... Out in the fields, or in the hay... Sometimes... just down on the dirt." The triangle that emerges has not her but Oates as the alluring apex, a symbol of wanderlust for one and plain lust for the other—ceremonial parallel montage sends the friend into the blurry horizon while the wife uneasily receives the protagonist back into her bed. Not Hopper's West (The Last Movie) but Fonda's, as lanky and gentle and off-center as a Monte Hellman fugue. Silhouettes like inky daguerreotypes, a wide-angle at the top of the windmill to give the strangeness of the terrain, plenty of shifting reds and oranges in Vilmos Zsigmond's dusky skies. The duties of familial nests and nomadic buddies are worked out in the desert with a burst of Peckinpah. "Don't you think it's about time you started practicin' bein' a husband again?" Fonda's patience and quietude are best appreciated by connoisseurs of the genre, cf. Troell's Zandy's Bride. With Robert Pratt, Severn Darden, Rita Rogers, and Ann Doran.
--- Fernando F. Croce |