Word: prescotts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...shot we have of Junior's trip in this opening-credits sequence shows him waking up some ways from the road, by a rocky crag and a river where his horse can catch its thirst; the rider touches his wound, but moves right on, right to the outskirts of Prescott, to his father's land...
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...
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...