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The cowboy is roused by a jet whooshing overhead, and at once you recognize Sam Shepard and Cormac McCarthy. (No place for him in "the age of the steady businessman," says Peckinpah the same year in Ride the High Country.) The buckaroo is a laidback rambler, a self-amused sheepherder who still hangs on to some tattered Old West code and is played by Kirk Douglas in tender continuation of Vidor's Man Without a Star. The land has been fenced in, automobile carcasses line the graveyard as he rides his trusty mare into Albuquerque. Gena Rowlands and a steak meal temporarily tempt him into settling down, soon enough he's getting himself thrown in jail to visit an imprisoned compadre (Michael Kane). Such rugged courtliness doesn't stay caged for long ("There's not much music in these bars"), the escape through the Sandia Mountains points the way "straight to Mexico on a carpet of pine needles." Sadists (George Kennedy's prison guard) and ninnies (William Schallert's radio operator) comprise the law on his trail, Walter Matthau as the sheriff stands wryly in the middle, a more domesticated sort of individualist. Frontier myths, not so much deglamorized as put to the test by barbed wire, helicopters, and a whole truckload of ACME toilets. "You know what a loner is? He's a born cripple." David Miller builds sturdily on Philip Lathrop's widescreen setups, but the star and Dalton Trumbo's screenplay are the true auteurs of this analysis of an anachronistic vagabond's "state of grace." The final irony is leaden, still nothing can take away from the pathos of Douglas broken-backed on a rainy highway, surrounded by his horse's anguished whinnying and his pursuer's lingering look of pity. (Or is it envy?) With Carroll O'Connor, Karl Swenson, William Mims, Martin Garralaga, Lalo Rios, and Bill Raisch. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |