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The taciturn ecstasy of the opening credits (silhouetted horsemen on a grassy hill, already in the slow-mo of legend) is that of a filmmaker at last able to add to the Western image he grew up with. Ford is the idol, though Walter Hill has also absorbed Peckinpah and Vietnam—nostalgia is shot through upheaval, the outlaws' celebration at a whorehouse has "The Battle Cry of Freedom" changed to "I'm a Good Old Rebel" at gunpoint. Unending wars and brothers in arms, "a lot of 'em 'round these parts." Jesse and Frank James (James and Stacy Keach), the Younger boys (David, Keith and Robert Carradine) and Ed and Clell Miller (Dennis and Randy Quaid), Missouri to Texas to Minnesota. Train robberies, vendettas on Pinkerton men, a pastoral respite with a lass on a swing. "First getting shot, then getting married. Bad habits." Myth and modernity in a meticulous and spacious construction, as elegant as a knife fight until it's as brutal as a blast to the face. Belle Starr (Pamela Reed) enters in a dash of John Sargent Singer to contrast with the masculine daguerreotypes (Degas informs her bathtub nudity), dancing couples at a hoedown coalesce into dark bronze abstractions as Bob and Charlie Ford (Nicholas and Christopher Guest) step out of the crowd into a foreground close-up. (A direct invocation of Fuller announces the Judas bullet.) No "revisionism" for Hill, merely a salute to Harry Carey Jr. on the stagecoach and a sacramental burnish that accumulates bloody splashes as it flows to the Northfield raid, where horses crash through the glass window that is the Panavision widescreen. "We played a rough game. We lost." As much a dream-film as The Driver or The Warriors, the vanishing paradise followed by purgatory (Wild Bill) and inferno (Deadwood). Cinematography by Ric Waite. With Shelby Leverington, Fran Ryan, Savannah Smith, James Whitmore Jr., Kevin Brophy, Amy Stryker, and James Remar.
--- Fernando F. Croce |