Word: rodeos
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...later, unsentimental education, mostly at the hands of a feisty, hard-drinking old rogue named Red (Richard Widmark) who signs him out of the reservation school. Red teaches him how to ride broncs and how to fall to up the odds. Together they tour the tank town rodeo circuit, always following the same strategy. Tom (Frederic Forrest) takes a tumble on his first ride, and Red offers high odds on the next event. The cowboys eagerly plunk their money down, and Tom rides flawlessly. It is a profitable little con, but Tom had something more conventional in mind...
...animate a characterization, not dominate it. Millar makes good use of him, especially in a devastating last scene when Tom returns as a man to the reservation school. "I've learned the new ways," he says, eyes full of grave irony suggesting scars without self-pity. The rodeo champion now wants only to tend the reservation horses, an ambition that suggests both a new awareness and a capitulation, a final defeat. ∎Jay Cocks
...mythic skill but a knockabout saint whose sort last surfaced in the works of Kerouac and Kesey. In short, he is good, clean wish fulfillment, and author and hero fall in love with him, in the manner of small boys. Santo does an impromptu star turn at a rodeo, befriends and soothes some strung-out hippies, and finally hands over his golden girl friend to Blake...
BONNER REPEATS a line used by Peckinpah in 1970 to seal the fate of the love-making preacher in the comedy-romance. The Ballad of Cable Hogue: when a svelte rodeo groupie asks him why he's so reticent about making an emotional commitment, he says, "I'm just passing through." His life-fulfillment is limited to the peak experiences of the rodeo. He's just drifting, and if he sounds heroic and his acts seem attractive, that's our problem as well...
There are flaws in the film, as there are in every Peckinpah production, but they are mostly due to Jeb Rosebrook's dialogue. Ace's language is sometimes that of a 19th century vaudevillian, and if God only knows what rodeo groupies talk like, it must be something different than what is said here. But there is enough full achieved in this film--with the aid of photographer Lucien Ballard, composer Jerry Fielding, and the setting and people of Prescott (where the first pro rodeo was held in 1888)-to reaffirm my faith in Sam Peckinpah as the first American...