DottHolliday

It might have been a good movie, but Hollywood's kowtowing to actors with recent success ensured that it soundly disappointed those who watched the movie. Marlon Brando's "eccentric" performance proves that as great and magnificent an actor as he was, he was equally as bad when he was not reined in by a director and script. Arthur Penn must bear a lot of the guilt for allowing Brando such a free hand in trashing the movie. I doubt that Marlon's antics went without negative comments and complaints from his fellow actors. Here he was given free rein and ruined what might have been a good movie. Nicholson, Lloyd, Quaid, Forrest, Stanton and other gave good performances, but they are inundated by Marlon Brando's absurdly bad "eccentric" performance. He wasn't eccentric, just BAD! If you skip this one, you will be ahead.

A movie is a collaboration of many technicians and artists working together to involve the viewer in the story the movie portrays. This collaboration failed because there was a strange paucity of motive or plot to the final conflict between the Dowdy's and the Eastman's. The movie that I was able to watch was, as an earlier viewer said, a collection of scenes cobbled together with little rhyme or reason for the characters actions. A their best they managed to be in chronological order. Mr. Martin, the writer, did manage some smooth and believable dialog, but without a plot or believable subplots the movies is just a hash or melange of scenes that fall apart without any believable motivation for characters actions or plot for the scenes to fit in. Maybe he can improve, since this was his first effort, but he need to learn a lot about structure and plot of a movie or play. The director, Mr. Cass, has directed a pretty good western in the past, "The Johnson County War." However, he must share in the lack of plot portrayed in the final film. The credits list a "Bronze Wrangler" Western Heritage Award,but it must have benefited from a lack of competition. If you don't expect a full story and can settle for watching the good scenes with some familiar television genre actors; and reading a book or newspaper until the next good scene then this will fill the bill. The sets, settings, costumes and actors were fairly good with a few inevitable anachronisms and contradictions, The western movie genre lost a lot of expertise in western period costumes and props with the death of the old studios systems.