True Grit was not Jeff Bridges' first grim Western . Plus: A movie where an entire room full of porn-watching mobsters are blown up with a grenade launcher. (Yes!)
The mega-movie The Avengers hits megaplexes today. Since superheroes never die — at least not forever — the theme this week is the antithesis of that, in a way: men dying. So we've got Jeff Bridges in a raw anti-Western, a documentary about the death penalty, and mobsters blown up with a grenade launcher.
If you're in the mood for Jeff Bridges with a bowler hat and a six-gun: Bad Company (1972, Robert Benton)
"Go West, young man." This imprecation hovers over Robert Benton's low-key anti-Western Bad Company like a sickly ironic joke. Horace Greeley's promised land turns out to be an endless barren expanse, a graveyard of grass and scattered gnarled trees through which mangy gangs of men wander, fighting over scraps of food and money. It's a survival-of-the-fittest situation, and mistakes tend to be very costly. In this world, as apart from the myth of the West as the post-apocalyptic landscape of The Road Warrior, what chance do fresh-faced youngsters like Union draft-dodger Drew Dixon (Barry Brown) and would-be bushwhacker Jake Rumsey (Jeff Bridges) have?
Youthful enthusiasm can only carry one so far before the nasty realities of the world come crashing through, and that's where the potency of Bad Company, one of the finest of the '70s-era revisionist Western, lies. Bridges is enjoyably gregarious, making a fine contrast to Brown's straight-laced rich boy, and he's got just enough piss-and-whiskey bravado in his apple cheeks to understand why he'd attract a following of like-minded young men. His youth, though, proves to be a liability when it comes to putting up or shutting up. As the film inevitably grows grimmer, it becomes a matter of having something to prove, that these boys won't let the West swallow them whole. There's violence and death, but Benton's quiet, deliberate tone takes the shock out of it - when someone dies, it's abrupt and without fanfare. It's simply a way of life. The Vietnam-era parallels are tough to miss, but at heart this is a dark coming-of-age story that treats its darkness as a fact rather than something with which to pummel the audience.
