Review of The Missouri Breaks (1976) by Jessica H — 09 Jul 2011

[85/B+] This is a strange, sly revisionist Western, full of the light and dirt and mud of the settling days of Montana. Nicholson plays the leader of a hapless, scruffy band of rustlers who bring down the law in the form of a psychotic bounty hunter, played with gleeful grotesqueness and abandon by Brando.

There is an uneasy sense despair and sadism running under all of it, but the movie is also imbued with touches of a kind of magical realism found in fables: a bullet that seems to pass through a bathing Brando (and his bathtub); the incredibly liberated daughter of the ruthless land baron; an evil, impish regulator more concerned with meting out death than collecting a bounty; the cosmic flip of fortune that turns the baron into a derelict (ruined in the summoning of a cruel abstract force) as the rustler rises into a hopeful homesteader and dealer of justice.

It's delightful to see Brando playing an all-out rollicking bad guy for once, rather than the usual ambiguous character inhabiting the moral or psychological grey zones, and he's fun to watch as he shifts haphazardly between accents and stomps all over the more mundane motivations of the other characters. Nevertheless, not surprisingly, he gives his loony villain an affectionate elegiac scene ere his abrupt demise.

All in all, this is an unpredictable movie that should stand among the best of its genre. Brando's performance in particular is outstandingly quirky and memorable.