Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974, Sam Peckinpah)

Silver Streak (1976, Arthur Hiller)

I didn't really watch this. I was falling asleep in and out. I thought that Pryor would be in this more. I usually love Colin Higgins' screenplay work. Should I have been watching Stir Crazy?

Bad Company (1972, Robert Benton)

Continuing my Jeff Bridges Marathon (started by Thunderbolt & Lightfoot ), I pulled Bad Company off my my shelf. I had never seen it before, but bought it some years ago because (a) it was cheap, and (b) based on the filmography of writer/director Robert Benton. Bad Company was Benton's directorial debut after having co-scripted Bonnie & Clyde for Warren Beatty/Arthur Penn. Like most Westerns made in the 1970's, Bad Company takes a revisionist look at Western mythology and character archetypes, with Benton balancing this with odd humor and sudden violence.

The main characters are Civil War draft evaders, Jake (Jeff Bridges) and Drew (Barry Brown), who meet up and become a roving band of would-be outlaws. We often forget that a lot of outlaws like "Billy The Kid" were actual teenagers during their height of popularity. Likewise, Jake's (Bridges) gang is made up primarily of teens and early twentysomethings. The youngest looking close to twelve. All inexperienced, and the film holds these characters to that inexperience. The kids are kids. They like to act like they know how to survive, but they don't even know how to skin a rabbit. When attempting to rob a stagecoach, the gang hides and sends one of the boys to flag down the coach. He flags down the coach, and rides off with them leaving the boys bewildered. I don't think they knew what to do. A shocking piece of "Assault on Precient 13"-type violence, involving a pie and a farmer, comes out of nowhere. But it perfectly drives home reality to us and the characters.

This was a easy going film that I look forward to revisiting. The Gordon Willis photography is beautiful and naturally-based. Jeff Bridges is (always) good; this time playing the dopey leader of the gang. Brown is an actor I was previously unfamiliar with, but I look forward to seeing him in something else (I own an unwatched Daisy Miller DVD). Benton's The Late Show will also be making its way off my shelf in the near future.

Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (1974, Michael Cimino)

All Movie Guide Summary:

As much an eccentric character study as a road movie, Michael Cimino's directorial debut follows the adventures of a quartet of misfits in their life of crime. Retired thief Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood) and sweet drifter Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) meet cute when Thunderbolt jumps into Lightfoot's stolen car to escape a gunman. The pair embarks on an oddball journey to get Thunderbolt's loot from an old robbery before his former associates, the sadistic Red (George Kennedy) and cretinous Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), get to it first, but all four are too late; the one-room schoolhouse hiding place has apparently vanished. So instead, the four play house and work legit jobs while they plot to rob the same place Thunderbolt and Red hit before. Although the plan goes awry, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot discover that they may still have succeeded-or so they think. As the easy-going mediator between the two, Eastwood's Thunderbolt was a move away from his tough cop-westerner image; his audience accepted this then-atypical performance enough to turn Thunderbolt and Lightfoot into a moderate hit. Bridges received his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, but Cimino turned down a subsequent deal with Eastwood, moving instead to his artistic peak with The Deer Hunter (1978) and career nadir with Heaven's Gate (1980).