Word: bronco
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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...
...mixed in with all the corn, of course, are a few good laughs. At one point, when the perfectually prissy and platinum (Sondra Locke) cuddles up to Bronco Billy in the back of his trailer, Eastwood gets all soft and sentimental and tells the story of his life. He went on the road, it turns out, after he went to jail. And he went to jail, it turns out, because he tried to kill somebody...
...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