Review of Joe Kidd (1972) by Gary B — 24 Nov 2007

Minor Eastwood. The first hour is rather good, with Elmore Leonard's script dealing with moral ambiguity, land rights, corporate corruption and shifting, complex allegiances. But this is Hollywood product, contrived and soulless, and you soon realise that this is appropriating and distorting the revolutionary tropes of certain Marxist spaghetti Westerns in pursuit of the usual glorification of Eastwood's American cult individualism.

The final half hour is a banal shoot-'em-up, with the choices making no sense and the denouement unbelievable. Even a train driving through the bar, an intriguing image, seems like a desperate attempt at a slap-bang effect rather than the comment on the industrialisation of the West it might have been in a better film.