Bad Company

Bad Company

The legend of the American West was mostly made up long after the West had been settled, civilized and made into Disneyland. The movie Westerns are usually romantic fantasies with no connection to a real West that ever existed; we know it but we like them anyway because it’s fun escapism.

But sometimes, you get a Western that pretends to be about the West as it actually was: “The Wild Bunch,” or “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” or “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid.”

“Bad Company” is such a Western. I don’t suppose it’s any more realistic than a John Wayne movie none of the “real” Westerns are but it has a nice blunt slice of life quality that grows on you. It concerns a group of young Civil War draft dodgers who leave the United States at St. Joseph, Mo., and drift westward in vague fashion.

They’re moving through supposedly Indian-infested territory, crawling with ferocious tribes like the Arapaho; in fact, however, they meet dangers imported from the East: pirate bands of outlaws, frontier vigilantes and their own mistrust of each other which is the greatest danger of all.

These boys are held together by no greater bond than that they happened to start out together. They steal each other’s horses and guns, abandon each other, save each other’s lives and then cheerfully double-cross one another. Their world is totally pragmatic.

David Newman and Robert Benton wrote “Bad Company,” which Benton directed; they also wrote “Bonnie and Clyde.” They achieve something of Bonnie’s elliptical narrative style scenes happen in no special order yet somehow build up to gradual tension but there is too much laconic dialog for its own good. We laugh at some lines but against our better judgment on others.

Example: while outlaws get the drop on our heroes their Falstaffian leader (David Huddleston) sits on his horse watching he stick-up critically. “That’s real good,” he says to his men. “Real threatening.” Or when a bankrupt farmer offers his wife to the boys for $8 consideration pathos & desperation here are sabotaged by Benton & Newman willingness’ go for laugh.

Drew Dixon (Barry Brown) is this film’s hero: methodist straight arrow from Ohio whose oldest son has already been lost in Union Army so sends youngest west rather than have him conscripted gets as far as St Joe where he falls victim to young con man played Jeff Bridges last picture show steals fight make up join forces trek through Indian territories four others

From here on, we expect the movie to be about how the boys come of age on the frontier. After all, they’re small town boys, not junior Indian scouts. There are a few good scenes along this line (the best is when Bridges shows how to skin a rabbit while becoming increasingly disgusted with himself). But it’s as if these children have been born with an encyclopedia of prairie lore inside them; somehow they outshoot and outsmart these outlaws even though there’s no logical reason for them to do so.

The film is structured like a series of more or less self contained episodes and some of those episodes are worth watching. But I feel that the film doesn’t know where it’s going and the last scene (one of those freeze-frames meant to crystallize something significant for us) left me hanging in midair. If any movie ever just plain stopped instead of arriving at a conclusion, this one did. Still, there were some nice moments along the way.

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