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The main derivation is from The Misfits for a replete articulation of the Hustonian theme ("If this world's all about winners, what's for the losers?"). The title character rattles in the rodeo circuit, thrown off the fulminating bovine and packed into the rusty, muddy convertible, the middle-aged chink in Steve McQueen's armor of Cool. "A rough way to miss a paycheck." Back home, but where is home? The Grapes of Wrath is brought to bear upon the shack pulverized by bulldozers, the brother (Joe Don Baker) has his gaze set on the future of suburbia, "total, but I mean total, electric living." Dad (Robert Preston) nurses a bandaged noggin under the Stetson, his latest dream of prospecting overseas is the kind of shaggy bunk Mom (Ida Lupino) can no longer put up with. The crinkly disenchantment and private integrity of "some kind of motel cowboy," a figure close to Sam Peckinpah's heart. The Old West is a state of mind swiftly dissipating and leaving only the fumes of manly obsolescence, wooden horses at the parade and caged cougars at the fair. Fractured and freeze-framed in the early passages, the image relaxes and expands to accommodate the documentary details of steer wrestling and human moments in an increasingly gentrified Arizona burg. (Father and son sit at the vacant train station, their quarrel is a hat on the floor and a freight locomotive between them, cf. Ozu's Floating Weeds.) The fling with the comely brunette (Barbara Leigh) is a brush in the corner of a barroom brawl, the real event is upstairs where the older generation struggles to negotiate a lifetime of rue and affection in a couple of minutes. "Well, second's better than third." The rendezvous with the bull and the road that follows, a bedeviled cinéaste's most affectionate poem. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. With Ben Johnson, Mary Murphy, Bill McKinney, Dub Taylor, Sandra Deel, and Don "Red" Barry.
--- Fernando F. Croce |