He's A Rodeo Man

slokes

I get a charge reading people's comments saying that "Junior Bonner" is director Sam Peckinpah's least violent movie. Who do they think got up first when Sam yelled cut, the Mexican stuntmen at Bloody Porch or the cowboys who really rode these snorting one-ton rawhide whipsaws with their lethal kicks?

Yeah, okay, "Junior Bonner" is the least squib-dependent film in Peckinpah's bloody oeuvre, an amiable character study featuring Steve McQueen in the title role, an aging rodeo rider still trying to live up to the promise of his legendary father Ace (Robert Preston). Junior wants a second chance at eight whole seconds aboard a singularly nasty black bull named "Sunshine", especially in front of his fractured family at the Pioneer Days event at his hometown of Prescott, Arizona.

But Peckinpah is not exactly downshifting into mellow. The sequences of rodeo riders in action, riding bulls and lassoing cattle, is shot in the same quick-cut, slow-mo style of Peckinpah's famous battle sequences, and the heartbreak every bit as acute. Note the scene where Junior pleads for another shot at Sunshine with rodeo boss Buck Roan (Ben Johnson), his expressive eyes registering cockiness and self-degradation. He's at the end of his rope, much like Pike Bishop in "The Wild Bunch", and facing no less hard a stop.

Buck just listens and laughs. Earlier on he states the absurdity of Junior's situation. "Most fellers would like to trade him off for a hound pup and then pay ten dollars to get the hound pup shot," Buck says. But for Junior, it's no less a showdown than any other western finale. "Just one of him and one of me," he says, offering half of whatever prize money he earns for the favor of a hoofprint in his head.

Critics carp about "Junior Bonner" lacking much in the way of a story. It does have a plot, but what it has more of is character and setting, the latter being the cowboy life in the then-contemporary early 1970s. Lucian Ballard's exquisite camera work captures every inch of Prescott, from its grimy saloons to the dusty drawing pit. When shooting a parade sequence, we get an eyeful of everything, spectators, cowboy girls, clowns, even the machines at the end sweeping the horse droppings away.

In that way, "Junior Bonner" is less a conventional movie than a place you go to feel a little of America's frontier spirit hanging on. And because the story IS there, and quite compelling as enacted by McQueen and his great supporting cast, you may well find yourself, as I do, revisiting this place again and again, picking up nuances and details that add to its singular thrill.

I'm not completely enthralled with "Junior Bonner". Like with "Wild Bunch" with its overrated scorpion sequence, there's a pedantic bit of business in the beginning involving Junior's standoff with a bulldozer, which pushes the central theme of time's leaving him behind in too overt a fashion. The rest of the film manages this message effectively enough without beating you over the head with it.

I used to feel the same way about another scene where Ace destroys a TV set showing a commercial featuring his other son, the capitalist success story Curly (Joe Don Baker), showing off his mobile home enterprise. But now I think that segment works, in large part because it shows how much Ace is still a child, and something akin to Keith Moon among rodeo men.

And McQueen! This isn't his most exciting performance, but it may well be his most richly textured. Just watch him gearing up for another ride, blowing his leather glove open, working his rope, and pulling his hat down. It shows how much McQueen could really project character, not just coolness, into a role.

I even love that goofy bar fight, which seems imported from an Andrew V. McLaglen movie and not at all like any other fight in a Peckinpah movie, except the one which opens "Ride The High Country". For those who wonder where that Sam Peckinpah went to after 1962, "Junior Bonner" offers a deep and wonderful answer, and a showcase for "staying cowboy" that lives on in every frame of this wonderful film.

score 8/10

slokes 1 July 2008

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1902889/