Overlooked little gem from the counter-cultural era (1972). It's about as unromantic a view of the Old West as you're likely to find this side of a hog wallow. Nice Christian boy Bruce Brown flees the Civil War and a Union press-gang only to head west and fall in with a youthful gang of petty thieves. The story is really about his gradual corruption from innocent survivor to hardened stickup man. But more than a morality tale, the movie debunks about every glamorized cliché you've ever seen about life on the frontier.
Consider the following-- a homesteader escapes from frontier poverty prostituting his wife along the way; hungry kids get their heads splattered for stealing a pie; companions steal from strangers and even from each other ; and worst of all are the six-guns that don't even shoot straight. I expect there's more truth packed into these 90 minutes than in a ton of traditional Westerns. But who wants reality when myth is so much more comforting. Just look at these guys, scruffy, dirty, and dressed like they're wearing every garment they've ever owned-- even the Black Hole of Calcutta would consider them a health hazard. Then there's the pitiful hovels of the settlers that stick up like ugly warts on a sea of futility. It's really the visuals that tell the story and with scarcely an ounce of romanticism.
Jeff Bridges is terrific as Jake, the sort-of-charming but "he'd steal your shoes" gang leader. Ditto, David Huddleston as the philosophical prairie king-pin, and Jim Davis as the ice-cold marshal (I really did expect the camera to turn away from the hanging). Brown's okay, but I'm not sure how well his more complex role and concept is written. All in all, this so-called anti-Western is a logical reaction to decades of prior Hollywood myth-making, which may have been entertaining but was also profoundly misleading in its conventions. Nonetheless, Bad Company is also highly entertaining, and despite the obscurity, a major revisionist film from a rebellious time period.
Consider the following-- a homesteader escapes from frontier poverty prostituting his wife along the way; hungry kids get their heads splattered for stealing a pie; companions steal from strangers and even from each other ; and worst of all are the six-guns that don't even shoot straight. I expect there's more truth packed into these 90 minutes than in a ton of traditional Westerns. But who wants reality when myth is so much more comforting. Just look at these guys, scruffy, dirty, and dressed like they're wearing every garment they've ever owned-- even the Black Hole of Calcutta would consider them a health hazard. Then there's the pitiful hovels of the settlers that stick up like ugly warts on a sea of futility. It's really the visuals that tell the story and with scarcely an ounce of romanticism.
Jeff Bridges is terrific as Jake, the sort-of-charming but "he'd steal your shoes" gang leader. Ditto, David Huddleston as the philosophical prairie king-pin, and Jim Davis as the ice-cold marshal (I really did expect the camera to turn away from the hanging). Brown's okay, but I'm not sure how well his more complex role and concept is written. All in all, this so-called anti-Western is a logical reaction to decades of prior Hollywood myth-making, which may have been entertaining but was also profoundly misleading in its conventions. Nonetheless, Bad Company is also highly entertaining, and despite the obscurity, a major revisionist film from a rebellious time period.