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The opening depicts a typical day tending cattle on the range until one of the wranglers is thrust against a wall by a horse, the Panavision screen of sunsets and vistas suddenly half-filled by a sprawled corpse. "Like a really bad, crazy dream," death, always in the back of the mind of the aging hired hand (William Holden). His fellow cowpuncher (Ryan O'Neal) is an impulsive youth, the two are carted off after a saloon brawl and take comfort in the idea that things can't get any worse just as a chamber pot is emptied out the window above them. The dream is a farm in Mexico, bank robbery is the logical path to money, "safer than gettin' married." No better place for Blake Edwards to distill the bleakness of his worldview than the frontier wilderness, thus a naturalistic revision of the Boracho episode from The Great Race to encapsulate the tragicomic challenge of being alive. Petty feuds under vast skies (Wyler's The Big Country), night is a reminder that the town is in the middle of a desert, a cougar leaps out of the darkness. The wronged rancher (Karl Malden) sends a posse, his sons (Joe Don Baker, Tom Skerritt) are deputized by the sheriff (Victor French) while hungover at the bordello. "But where are you gonna find a cowboy that's got any sense?" The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are taken into account, slow-motion gives lyricism (the taming of an unruly bronco) and horror (a hot iron for an infected wound amid snowflakes). The fragile peace of a bath and a señorita, the bloodshed that erupts from a poker game, Holden's magnificent twilight melancholia throughout. It leads to Monument Valley but ends with Stroheim rather than Ford, one last Edwards grace note. "Partner, I'm gonna shoot the first man who says you ain't got style." Cinematography by Philip Lathrop. With James Olson, Lynn Carlin, Leora Dana, Sam Gilman, Moses Gunn, William Bryant, Ted Gehring, Alan Carney, and Rachel Roberts.
--- Fernando F. Croce |