Word: rodeoing
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JUNIOR BONNER begins with a black-and-white fog-grained portrait of the title rodeo star, played acutely by a mellowed Steve McQueen, lowering himself onto a snorting Brahma bull called Sunshine. The rodeo announcer tells us some basic facts: Jr. was a two-year bull-riding champion, now nearing 40, a bit past his prime, Sunshine has never been ridden for the full 8 seconds time. The gate to the pen is thrown open, clowns dressed in baggy checked pants and vests and red fright wigs lure the bull out and get him jumping. Bonner holds...
...again and again to them, split-screen images tuned to the ruffling of the rodeo man's brow, as 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...
...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 of our Sunshine," the girl answers, as she flips a can of beer over...
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...
...drained. But Junior knows his limits as well. Ace couldn't raise the family, couldn't do right by his wife--who has more understanding than any of them, and a rare rapport with Junior. And, more painful than anything else, Junior knows his own limits. He is a rodeo man and that's it, better than his father only in his disillusionment, not yet in any practice. But he's made his choices, has found them suitable and sticks with them, not therefore fancying himself a hero, but gaining the old Socratic sense of irony behind that laconic exterior...