Word: peckinpah
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Directed by SAM PECKINPAH Screenplay by JEB ROSENBROOK...
...frontier is gone, the West is closing in on itself, there is no room left for the old ways. No one has watched these changes with such deep understanding or portrayed them so memorably as Sam Peckinpah, whose westerns, from Ride the High Country through The Ballad of Cable Hogue all seem to be infused with a kind of sunset light. They concern men living stubbornly in the middle of change, hanging on, scarcely surviving. "We got to look beyond our guns," one of the outlaws says in The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah's greatest film. Everyone agrees...
Junior Banner is Peckinpah's most contemporary western, set in Prescott, Ariz., a town that hews to the traditions of the past by holding a rodeo every year even as its outskirts are being bulldozed for a housing development. Ace (Robert Preston) used to be a champ, a great bull rider who once performed in Madison Square Garden and talked to Jack Dempsey as one champion to another. Now he devotes most of his time to hustling up a stake...
...Even if Peckinpah's had been first, though, Junior Bonner would still be lackluster stuff. The dialogue is straight Grand Ole Opry, and Peckinpah tries to make it work by underplaying everything, which is like turning down the volume on a bad record instead of switching...
...Maybe Peckinpah told the wrong story. To judge from Junior Bonner, he has little love for the West, and little interest in it. He apparently felt obliged to make some kind of comment on it, but like Ace, his heart lies somewhere else - in the past, or maybe in Australia. Ace Bonner in the outback - there's the real movie...