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The chummy ride to a hanging set to "Oh Susanna" is indicative of the air of serene lunacy, with looming dandelions recalled by Kurosawa (Dreams). Rustling horses in Montana ain't what it used to be, the gang leader (Jack Nicholson) tries a train robbery and ends up dangling from a bridge, cultivating a cabbage patch is a safer bet. The nemesis is a patriarchal rancher (John McLiam) with a well-thumbed copy of Tristram Shandy and a daughter (Kathleen Lloyd) who's rather modern for the 19th-century. "Why don't we take a walk and talk about the Wild West and how to get out of it?" Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is the point of departure, the malevolent whimsy of Thomas McGuane's script receives Arthur Penn's relaxed reading in the filmmaker's shaggiest genre derangement. Identity in flux on unsettled terrain, a pipsqueak in the saloon-tribunal crowns himself "The Lonesome Kid" to audience laughter. "We'd prefer something colorful, life on the frontier being what it is." The fellow bandit (Harry Dean Stanton) hangs on to a memory of a beloved dog shot for sticking its tongue on a pat of butter, the expedition into Canada has the Mounties hot on his trail. "Every outfit oughta have a comedian," enter Marlon Brando as the infamous "regulator" hired by the land baron, nursing a sore tooth and seeking a bubble bath. Wandering brogue and bird-watching binoculars, schoolmarm bonnet and equine carrot—a whirl of extravagant inventions, a genius actor's madcap-sinister private gig. ("Well, old Granny's gettin' tired," he mutters after skewering his prey with a cross-shaped harpoon.) Samuel Johnson's blade of grass, warrior into farmer into poet per Thomas Jefferson, "a guy back East." A weirdly likable shambles, its showbiz side is taken up by Altman in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson. With Randy Quaid, Frederic Forrest, John P. Ryan, Steve Franken, Sam Gilman, Luana Anders, Richard Bradford, Daniel Ades, and James Greene.
--- Fernando F. Croce |