Word: bonner
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...battered Junior makes his way back to his trailer. Every bit of stable dirt crusting on his boots, every slap of leather chaps against dungarees, even the feel of sweated denim against the man's chest, reminds him of his failure. The champ, good-natured, broadfacedly smiling, watches Bonner tape his bruised midsection. ("Whooiee!" says Twilliger). He also backs up Bonner's white Cadillac to his horse trailer. "Maybe I'd better take up another line of work," says Bonner...
Then Jerry Fielding's rueful music grows percussively insistent, and breaks into a Rod Hart song about how an Arizona morning could make a Prescott roamer almost want to settle down. The landscape is hard and scrubby, but its color is warm. This is home. Bonner stops at a gas station-fruit market, buys fuel, and apples, and feeds one to his horse. Another frontier Cadillac passes him when he's back on the open road, driven by two rodeo friends with two pretty young ladies. "How you feeling, cowboy?" calls one. "Lonely, right now." "Have a taste...
Junior is, by any outside standards, a loser. When he returns to Prescott, it's to a family broken by his cowboy father's rodeo roistering and his younger brother's commercialism: Curly Bonner turns the homestead ranch into a site for electrically-equipped mobile homes (Ace Bonner has agreed to it after losing all his cash in hair-brained prospecting schemes), and the mother is going to be installed in the development curio shop. Junior himself is swiftly losing the respect he once held in other men's eyes. He asks stock contractor Buck Roan (played fullheartedly...
...director Sam Peckinpah and writer Jeb Rosebrook want us to learn more about Junior Bonner and through him. Bonner is the not inglorious hero of his film, both his attitude towards the world and his personal morality make him so. Bonner knows that most of Prescott is for shit, pure and simple; that most of the people never appreciated that Arizona morning, and hustle like carney hucksters to package the West which gives them their identity and heritage and sell it for a price--if it makes surviving easier. Junior can't settle for that mediocrity, can't stand...
...BONNER REPEATS a line used by Peckinpah in 1970 to seal the fate of the love-making preacher in the comedy-romance. The Ballad of Cable Hogue: when a svelte rodeo groupie asks him why he's so reticent about making an emotional commitment, he says, "I'm just passing through." His life-fulfillment is limited to the peak experiences of the rodeo. He's just drifting, and if he sounds heroic and his acts seem attractive, that's our problem as well...