Amigos e Aventureiros

There are three edit-versions I've seen of this. Best is the uncut. Another removes a small sex bit with Patti D'Arbanville topless but it's fine anyway. Another takes out many funny parts for "moral transgressions", loses the whole movie, and shouldn't be seen at all. I won't name those cable stations that show it. This is an important movie. Sam ("Killing Fields") Waterston and Jeff Bridges both really got their careers rolling in this. Slim Pickens climaxed his great body of work. Harry Dean Stanton revived his career. Director Frank ("The Swimmer") Perry got it right, grainy and relaxed like a home movie. Most laid back and brilliant, wit abounds, the scenery stuns, and it makes you feel good. A delight, at least for us of the Baby Boomer generation.

Two modern day day cattle rustlers cut up stolen cattle while talking about the tooth fairy. Macho ranch owners who at one time used to run beauty parlors. Romantic candlelight dinners that turn into wild sex orgies and last but not least $50,000 steer who tears up a motel room. You also get to see the 'world championship pong game'. This is the very first video game that two of the rustlers play while talking business.

This is just a few of the off the wall ingredients that await you in this thoroughly engaging, thoroughly quirky little charmer. To say it is just quirky wouldn't be doing it enough justice because it is much more than that. Writer McGuane literally takes every cliche and then playfully works against it. It's success comes from it's ability not to betray itself. No contemporary or 'normal' characters and no broad humor. It's flashiness comes through it's subtlety and laid back nature. Like a good western ballad it's sly and knowing without ever looking like it.

This is somewhat similar to McGuane's 92 IN THE SHADE that came out at roughly the same time. Both are good and deal with eccentric characters and humor yet this one fairs better. Mainly because director Perry edits it more tightly. All scenes revolve either around character or story developement. No scenes are excessive in length. Thus you have a better pace and better story momentum.

This is a fun movie to watch over and over. Simply because it is so original and done in a very original way. It also makes a good point about the decline of the modern day west which is and maybe always was just a state of mind.

Slim Pickens has his best supporting role since DR STRANGELOVE.

Filmed on location in Montana which is gorgeous and a real treat since a lot of films aren't done there.

A truly funny, gentle, intelligent movie. A rare cinematic experience, in that the surprise ending doesn't leave one feeling manipulated. Slim Pickens' performance was on a par with his work in Dr. Strangelove. A great "western" for those who,like myself, don't particularly like "westerns".

Rancho Deluxe is a rare delight. It's a Western with a modern twist. The `good guys' are the ranchers. The `bad guys' are rustlers, down and out young men who poach cattle just to get by, pay their rent, and eat. Naturally, your sympathies lie with the rustlers, because they're the underdogs.

We also sympathize with the rustlers because the ranchers are wealthy, socially prominent and dominant – everything the rustler's aren't. They have everything they could want, so they're bored. And when the rustling problem appears, they treat it as sport – like hunting a predatory animal. But their boredom takes other amusing forms as well. In one scene, the lady of the house tries to light a fire with the ranch hands. She's one of many cowgirls in the movie, women who like to be in the saddle, and to be the saddle. `Come on, goddamit,' she yells at the cowboys, Burt and Kurt. `I want some Gothic ranch action around here! I want some desire under the elms! I want to see some smoldering blazes down at the old corral!' It's hilarious. These guys are worthless. So it's a sad irony that her husband, who boasts that the B-Bar-Lazy-T has `the best matrons and the best sires,' must confine his boast to the non-human mammals on the ranch. When he takes his prize stud-bull to the county fair, the announcer describes it as having `tremendous thickness and length… This bull has it all: size, bone, trim and color. It just brings tears to my eyes.' One can almost see the tears of unsatisfied desire in his wife's eyes as well – that all the virile sires are bovine.

Slim Pickens, a former horse-thief turned cattle detective, is brilliant, funnier than ever. And then there are the scenes that provide a little social satire. Speaking of the Western love of pickup trucks, for example, one character denounces them as `a sickness here worse than alcohol or dope. It's the pickup truck death. And there's no cure for it.' I wonder sometimes if I don't recognize the disease right here in Flagstaff.

All in all, Rancho Deluxe is a very entertaining hour and a half.

Genuine sleeper. Was there ever anyone better at playing a "good ole' boy" than the Hollywood-bred Jeff Bridges. Here he's an upper-class dropout turned Montana cattle rustler, of all things. When he and Indian partner Sam Waterston aren't shooting steers or cavorting with the girls, they're making plans for their Rancho Deluxe where they'll retire in luxury. That is, if inept rancher Clifton James doesn't catch them first. Back in my old Saturday matinée days, rustlers rode horses and captured whole herds, while ranchers gathered in posses and tracked them down. Not now. Instead the boys ride in pickups and chainsaw the steer where it drops, while the two-man posse gets a bird's eye view from a helicopter, not that it does rancher James any good.

Chuckles galore in this crafty screenplay that manages some neat twists and a whole truck load of colorful characters. There's James's wife (Ashley), sort of a slick Montana version of Lady Chatterley, along with lucky ranch hand Harry Dean Stanton who makes first-class use of a skinny aspen tree. Then there's broken-down cattle detective Slim Pickens. You know, the guy last seen riding Dr. Strangelove's A-bomb into the smithereens of a Soviet city, along with comely daughter Charlene Dallas who's also an occasional virgin. I hope whoever did the sharp-eyed casting here got a bonus. They certainly deserved one.

Actually, my favorite part is when Waterston gets together on a lake bank with wise, old Dad. Now, I was always told that drink was the curse of the working class, or maybe it was work itself. Anyhow, not so, says Dad, at least not so in Montana. Instead, says Dad, Montana's curse is the pickup truck. Everybody stays broke because everybody has to have one. Get a few bucks and what do they do—they buy a pickup, afford it or not. In fact, the state is being impoverished and overrun by these 4-wheel critters. Anyway, it's a humorous and apparently incisive observation from novelist McGuane himself.

Then too, for those who've ever wondered where the store-bought flies so beloved by fishermen come from, the movie answers the burning question. And speaking of shotgun marriage, watch Bridges teach the interlopers a lesson in bedroom manners in a humorous bit that stands expectation on its head. All in all, the 90 minutes remains an oddball and unromantic look at the modern frontier. But with the clever script and colorful characters, the movie also amounts to a light-hearted and slyly understated treat.