Bad Company

In giving this an 8/10 rating, that goes into the top 7% or so of about 2500 movies I've viewed so far. Indeed, it falls right into that category of "one of the great films you most likely haven't seen." Why movies like this go unrecognized like they have is beyond me. If you've seen it, you already know what I'm talking about, so I wonder if I'm preaching to the converted here. I doubt I have much to say beyond what any other reviewers have already covered. This is a gritty and real, and yet also romanticized, take on the Western, beautifully shot (by DP Gordon Willis of the Godfather movies - enough said) and littered with dark comedy, not of the laugh-out-loud variety, but of the "these guys are so sad" variety. It also happens to be the second movie I've seen with both Jeff Bridges and David Huddleston, some 25 or so years prior to an actualized cult classic. The combination of these two actors in a film, appearing together in scenes only briefly, seems somehow, inexplicably, to touch a film with a certain genius.

A young man dodging the draft in the Civil War falls in with bad company on his way west. A group of juveniles trying to be hardcases, they run into a variety of men trying to do the same and one or two actual tough nuts. On the way, our narrator (Barry Brown) learns more than the usual lessons about what it is to be a man, to be brave and to be a friend. Brown will make you wish his career had been longer. Jeff Bridges is his usual terrific self.

Robert Benton, one of America's real treasures as a writer and director, is the force behind this. You'll see that many of the themes he was interested in back then still echo in Nobody's Fool and Twilight.

In 1973 my wife and sat in a theater with three other paying guests and six theater workers and watched Bad Company. We were transfixed by the sheer power of this magnificent American drama. Last weekend, with a recently released low speed version of the move, our seventeen-year-old son watched it for the first time and simply said "They should put it back in the theaters!"

This is one of the most overlooked, underrated, forgotten and ignored great films of the last twenty-five years. Acting, story, editing, photography, score - all are right on the money. My eternal thanks to Jaffe and Benton for having the courage of their convictions.

Another reviewer said that this film has been widely ignored and that is a crying shame. I've only seen the once in ten years, it's not on TV/satellite and is unavailable on video in the UK.

But I never forget watching it and being captivated by its charm and depiction of the real, sometimes very brutal West (I cannot forget one of the young gang getting shot for stealing a pie). The two leads are excellent, perfectly balancing the other, Bridges as the streetwise tearaway and Brown (RIP) as the well educated, mother's boy lead astray after dodging the draft (Vietnam echoes?).

The final scene is a gem as the two partners, shaped by their experiences in a lawless West, turn to crime.

It is no coicidence that one of the characters in this film is named Hobbs (Geoffrey Lewis), for this film dramatizes vividly what happens when you refuse to defend civil society. After escaping conscription into the Union army, the protagonist Drew Dixon is dumped out into the state of nature, a struggle for mere subsistence, joining a band of boys that die or drift apart as soon as they perceive their interests to be opposed those of the others. Drew perceives himself as a Christian man, but slowly realizes, thanks to the man he thinks is least moral (Jake), that he has been an amoral man all along. For Drew set out to meet only his own interests, ever since he joined Jake and the boys. In the end, we are left with a pivotal ambiguity: have we just seen the story of a young man molded by his environment, or a story in which evil begins with the choice to rebel?