"Joe Kidd" is another little Fievel born from a mountain of good promises... I say 'another' because I happen to have watched it back-to-back with Clint Eastwood's "Hang' Em High" (directed by Ted Post) and I was disappointed to witness the same narrative pattern: a terrific set-up spoiled by inconsistent characterization after the first twenty minutes and ultimately ruined by action sequences and romantic undertones so half-baked and formulaic they make the final result rather uneventful.
Take a director like Sam Peckinpah, he wasn't the most subtle storyteller but at least his movies had soul tying the package together, they had energy and a sort of twisted macho vision of the world that could confine to romanticism in the twilight of the frontier era. And "Joe Kidd" is set in the same timeline and place of others revisionist Westerns of the late 60s/early 70s, the Mexican frontier and in the early 1900s where subsisted a few remains of the Old West in some places that civilization kept on a suspended sentence John Sturges would magnificently depict such remaining spots in his masterpiece "Bad Day at Black Rock" but his offering here would freeze the whole Sierra Nevada, it is a 'ghost town' of a film where even the figure of Eastwood can't carry for too long.
And that it took Eastwood to resurrect the genre as a director doesn't surprise me when I see his streak of forgettable movies between the Leone era and his "High Plains Drifter", this is an actor who built such a personality of his own that he couldn't be directed except by the two men who made him: Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. "Joe Kidd" wasn't directed by a newcomer either, but the heart wasn't in it and booze didn't help, contributing to a bancal story where good, the bad and the ugly intertwine in a confusing and infuriating way that make you suspect no one cared for the film. Who'd blame them anyway? Eastwood was starting to direct his own films by the time "Joe Kidd" was made and Duvall who plays the villain, was giving one of his best performances ever in "The Godfather.
There were some good things about "Joe Kidd", a movie that allow the Mexican voice to be raised in form of a character like Luis Chama (John Saxon) who's a sort of desperado version of Emiliano Zapata and confronting him to a judge to the situation of peasants being thrown off their lands by the American government, can't be a bad film at all and would almost make you feel there's a pretension for depth and political commentary, this is the New Hollywood era after all. But then Elmore Leonard's script takes the film to a direction so contradictory that the whole thing feels like a cheat. It chooses to make Chama an enemy of Kidd... who's not a saint either.
At first, it had established Joe Kidd (Eastwood) as a drunken poacher, former bounty hunter, arrested for making a stew out of a deer he hunted on Indian land ... and a few other shenanigans, a man who thanked his cellmate for eating his breakfast by throwing the rest of the beans on his face. We get it, this is antiheroic Eastwood and his mimcs during his tribunal hearing had me started for good. But then the plot starts to show its total lack of inspiration when Joe saves the judge from a kidnapping with such contrived facility you start to question the determination of Chama... then it so happens that the man in the jail was Chama's men and that Joe kills in self-defense. Now, it's personal?!
Wait, there's more, the town's sheriff (Gregory Walcott) asks Joe to help him find Chama (he's good at hunting, don't forget). But Joe would rather stays home, then there's the rich landowner Frank Harlan (whose interests are severely undermined by Chama's revolutionary ideas), he makes the same offer but Joe still refuses. Only after he discovered that Chama raided his own ranch that Joe joins the gang. Now, it's personal. Or is it? Later in the film, Joe sees the way Harlan treats poor Mexican villagers and threatens to kill five hostages every day to convince Chama to surrender, and so he changes his mind.
The film could have been a new version of "A Fistful of Dollars" or "Yojimbo" but at least these films had a character motivated by greed and despising humanity with reasons solid enough to justify his cynicism... but Kidd is the kind of man who hasn't made up his mind until the final minutes of the film and so we keep floating on uncertainty throughout the film wondering which sides are the best. Naturally, it's Eastwood and that he gets the girl at the end, and Chama's love lady at that, shows that the whole purpose of a film like "Joe Kidd" is to be a vehicle for the star-wagon conducted by Eastwood. Sturges wasn't committed enough to his work to make Chama either a solid sidekick or a worthy opponent, it was Eastwood all alone.
There are action sequences, shootouts, there's a nice moment where Joe gets rid of the goons one by one but the result is rather forgettable, by the moment the film ends, all that matters is that Kidd killed the bad guy, punched the Sheriff and got the girl. Saxon would later apologize for having portrayed a coward character but the film is so forgettable it's actually harmless and even Mexican audiences admire Eastwood a little more, the same Eastwood who made a career out of that image and proved able to draw more nuanced portraits of antiheroes. One should watch this film as one of these last oddities before he would take the reins... and prove that he could keep on the same persona but with the right story, it worked.
In "Joe Kidd", it obviously didn't.
Take a director like Sam Peckinpah, he wasn't the most subtle storyteller but at least his movies had soul tying the package together, they had energy and a sort of twisted macho vision of the world that could confine to romanticism in the twilight of the frontier era. And "Joe Kidd" is set in the same timeline and place of others revisionist Westerns of the late 60s/early 70s, the Mexican frontier and in the early 1900s where subsisted a few remains of the Old West in some places that civilization kept on a suspended sentence John Sturges would magnificently depict such remaining spots in his masterpiece "Bad Day at Black Rock" but his offering here would freeze the whole Sierra Nevada, it is a 'ghost town' of a film where even the figure of Eastwood can't carry for too long.
And that it took Eastwood to resurrect the genre as a director doesn't surprise me when I see his streak of forgettable movies between the Leone era and his "High Plains Drifter", this is an actor who built such a personality of his own that he couldn't be directed except by the two men who made him: Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. "Joe Kidd" wasn't directed by a newcomer either, but the heart wasn't in it and booze didn't help, contributing to a bancal story where good, the bad and the ugly intertwine in a confusing and infuriating way that make you suspect no one cared for the film. Who'd blame them anyway? Eastwood was starting to direct his own films by the time "Joe Kidd" was made and Duvall who plays the villain, was giving one of his best performances ever in "The Godfather.
There were some good things about "Joe Kidd", a movie that allow the Mexican voice to be raised in form of a character like Luis Chama (John Saxon) who's a sort of desperado version of Emiliano Zapata and confronting him to a judge to the situation of peasants being thrown off their lands by the American government, can't be a bad film at all and would almost make you feel there's a pretension for depth and political commentary, this is the New Hollywood era after all. But then Elmore Leonard's script takes the film to a direction so contradictory that the whole thing feels like a cheat. It chooses to make Chama an enemy of Kidd... who's not a saint either.
At first, it had established Joe Kidd (Eastwood) as a drunken poacher, former bounty hunter, arrested for making a stew out of a deer he hunted on Indian land ... and a few other shenanigans, a man who thanked his cellmate for eating his breakfast by throwing the rest of the beans on his face. We get it, this is antiheroic Eastwood and his mimcs during his tribunal hearing had me started for good. But then the plot starts to show its total lack of inspiration when Joe saves the judge from a kidnapping with such contrived facility you start to question the determination of Chama... then it so happens that the man in the jail was Chama's men and that Joe kills in self-defense. Now, it's personal?!
Wait, there's more, the town's sheriff (Gregory Walcott) asks Joe to help him find Chama (he's good at hunting, don't forget). But Joe would rather stays home, then there's the rich landowner Frank Harlan (whose interests are severely undermined by Chama's revolutionary ideas), he makes the same offer but Joe still refuses. Only after he discovered that Chama raided his own ranch that Joe joins the gang. Now, it's personal. Or is it? Later in the film, Joe sees the way Harlan treats poor Mexican villagers and threatens to kill five hostages every day to convince Chama to surrender, and so he changes his mind.
The film could have been a new version of "A Fistful of Dollars" or "Yojimbo" but at least these films had a character motivated by greed and despising humanity with reasons solid enough to justify his cynicism... but Kidd is the kind of man who hasn't made up his mind until the final minutes of the film and so we keep floating on uncertainty throughout the film wondering which sides are the best. Naturally, it's Eastwood and that he gets the girl at the end, and Chama's love lady at that, shows that the whole purpose of a film like "Joe Kidd" is to be a vehicle for the star-wagon conducted by Eastwood. Sturges wasn't committed enough to his work to make Chama either a solid sidekick or a worthy opponent, it was Eastwood all alone.
There are action sequences, shootouts, there's a nice moment where Joe gets rid of the goons one by one but the result is rather forgettable, by the moment the film ends, all that matters is that Kidd killed the bad guy, punched the Sheriff and got the girl. Saxon would later apologize for having portrayed a coward character but the film is so forgettable it's actually harmless and even Mexican audiences admire Eastwood a little more, the same Eastwood who made a career out of that image and proved able to draw more nuanced portraits of antiheroes. One should watch this film as one of these last oddities before he would take the reins... and prove that he could keep on the same persona but with the right story, it worked.
In "Joe Kidd", it obviously didn't.