Word: bronco
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...looking for the normal gunslamming, Dirty Harry with a .44 magnum taking aim at the streets of San Francisco, you won't find it in Bronco Billy. What you will find is a hard luck story--with a plot as an excuse for satire...
...phrase like that would ordinarily be accompanied by a raised eyebrow and a sardonic grin. But neither Bronco Billy, the new Clint Eastwood movie, nor Carny, which introduces Robbie Robertson of the Band to the Hollywood fiction film, has so much as a single irony up its workshirt sleeve. They both tell the story of a good ole boy leading his small-top troupe from one tank town to another, juggling dreams of success and threats of eviction, extortion and worse. Add a couple of good buddies, a venal politician or two-and, most important, a little love interest...
...Bronco Billy has only one star, but surely one is enough when he is among the biggest box-office attractions in the world. Here, though, Eastwood plays handsomely against type, replacing his Dirty Harry figure with a good-as-gold rodeo star who refers to his fans as "little pards," prays for them not to "get tangled up with hard liquor and cigarettes" and hopes his wild West show will make enough money to pay for a ranch "where city kids can come out and see what the West was really like." He lavishes his kindness on everyone from runaway...
...makes Rocky Balboa sound as cynical as Céline, has not graced movies since John Wayne's "Singin' Sandy" westerns of the mid-'30s. His nemesis turned girlfriend recalls the snooty madcaps of the old screwball comedies. Sondra Locke is no Carole Lombard; indeed, Bronco Billy would have benefited from the presence of a more elegant, less abrasive actress like Jill Clayburgh or Blythe Banner. But Locke strong-arms her way into your affections at about the time Billy wins her over, and by the end of Bronco Billy she has become a part...
...wrote: "At 50, everyone has the face he deserves." Orwell was dead at 46; but Eastwood, who turned 50 on May 31, keeps trucking man fully through middle age with the face his movies deserve- sun-burnished, granite-hard, seamed and serene like an outdoor sculpture. His achievement in Bronco Billy, as star and director, is to chisel some emotion and innocence, and a passel of likability, into those features. It is as if one of the faces on Mount Rushmore suddenly cracked a crooked smile. Watching Bronco Billy, millions of moviegoers are likely to smile back. - Richard Corliss