Word: balladeers
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...Goin' South does provide him with the funniest -and possibly the most enjoyable-role he's ever had. Henry Moon, the film's Texas outlaw hero, can take his place alongside Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, John Wayne in True Grit and Jason Robards in The Ballad of Cable Hogue. A good-hearted rogue with slovenly personal habits, Moon is the essence of frontier vulgarity. He gobbles meals in a single bite, guzzles booze as if it were mother's milk and addresses women with a courtliness so exaggerated that it comes out obscene. Nicholson...
...owes its existence in part to the early Allman Brothers, the group that Skynyrd always played second Les Paul to until just before the end. And thrown in for filler are two songs by then drummer and vocalist Rickey Medlocke which are so un-Skynyrd-like in their flutey ballad styling that they seem to have snuck onto the record while the producer was out to lunch...
This is some small part of what he means in his beautiful ballad The Promise, when he sings about making "my peace with the past." He dropped The Promise from his new album, fearing that it could be narrowly interpreted as a comment on his legal hassles, which he believes have been credited with "too much affect on my writing." He performs the song in concert, though, and its dour, defiant spirit haunts the album nonetheless...
DYLAN TRIES TO FIT a ballad into his new style in "Changin of the Guard", but cannot quite pull it off. The ballad's lyrics, full of the never-quite-clear symbols Dylan has used with such relish over the past few years, just does not mesh with the music; the keyboard work is a little too slick, the background vocals...
...Next to this muddleheaded film, F.I.S.T. starts to look like a dynamic political manifesto. Peckinpah tries to enliven the nonsense with slow-motion automotive stunts and barroom brawls, but these signature sequences just do not have the energy of the director's best work (The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue) or even his worst (The Killer Elite, Bring Me the Head of Al fredo Garcia). At one point the film's hero announces that "the purpose of the convoy is to keep moving"; maybe so, but if Convoy has any purpose, forward movement...