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"Dirtiest, rottenest trade ever turned a dollar," the titular bounty-hunters, by comparison the grizzled fur trapper emerging from a busy winter (Burt Lancaster) is a free and easy entrepreneur. He's relieved of his pelts in a forcible exchange with Kiowa tribesmen, and finds himself with an escaped slave (Ossie Davis) still in ruffled Louisiana shirt. Able to quote Aesop in Latin but quite helpless in the wilderness, the runaway fancies himself "a Black Comanche" and falls in with the posse of scalphunters heading down Mexico way. Their leader (Telly Savalas) is an infamous outlaw but also a henpecked beau, his dame (Shelley Winters) is a fussy former saloon gal not particularly keen on some of his habits. "You ever kiss anybody chewed tobacco?" The urbane Sydney Pollack at home in sagebrush country, an ingratiating Western in the shadow of both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and In the Heat of the Night. The slob is set on getting his beaver skins back while the snob ponders which dunderheaded master will get him closer to freedom, Lancaster and Davis have this at their fingertips like a rough and tumble comedy duo. Savalas is photographed in pinkish long johns against the desert sun, Winters is given an astrological bent and a stogie and a little shrug for embracing the ol' fate worse than death. "What the hell. They're only men." Falling boulders and tumbling wagons bespeak a close study of Anthony Mann, a Remington view of a watering hole is made to writhe with a screenful of horses bucking on locoweed. The mud-caked punchline on the racial divide derives from Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow. "Throw you in the pigpen and you'd come out vice president of the hogs!" Pollack reconsiders the journey in Jeremiah Johnson. With Dabney Coleman, Paul Picerni, Dan Vadis, Armando Silvestre, and Nick Cravat.
--- Fernando F. Croce |