Best movie of this year hands down!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This movie is the most charming, full of self-irony, cheerfulness and mystic depth a fairy tale that Clint Eastwood has ever made. Things do not just happen here. They happen just right the way he ever wished them to happen.The film could be taken as if it were of an entertaining genre at the first glance. However, it has a multitude of layers, which may keep you analyzing for about as much as you may wish to. It contains a deal of self-reflection, for Bronco Billy is the director's best self. It is much about finding and understanding oneself, for that is the journey Sandra Lockes character is taking. It is much about the western movie as a whole, and its loosing contact with the modern time. One can't but see parallels to Fellini's 'La Strada', maybe to Bergman's 'Sawdust and tinsel' and perhaps many more. And it is filled with plenty of small details, charged with good humour. And of course, as a fairy tale it is full of idealistic messages.Is is not a regular masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece. It is a meta-, reflective, essentially post-modernistic, masterpiece. Most probably will suit the taste of those looking for art and substance.

(Credit IMDb) An idealistic, modern-day cowboy struggles to keep his Wild West show afloat in the face of hard luck and waning interest.This movie has sporadically enjoyable moments. My problem is there aren't nearly enough of them. Clint wanted a change of pace at this juncture, and I respect him heavily for it. It has a great cast, and it just doesn't deliver like it should. Sondra Locke (Eastwood's love interest at the time) is abrasive to the extreme. Her whiny, demanding, and know it all character ruined a lot of this movie for me as well. She's on the road with Eastwood a lot in this movie, and it gets tiresome quickly. Some of the circus scenes are admittedly fun to watch. Eastwood is fun as always, and managed to nail his part as the wily vet, Bronco Billy. I should have garnered more emotional stimulus out of this than I did. The story was there to be memorable, they just couldn't capitalize. I don't remember a whole lot about it, but it was a bit of a misfire5.2/10

I thought this was a very good film. A pleasure to watch, not boring, fun, exciting and a good story throughout. It came on TV at like 2:00am and i sat up and watched it all and didn't get bored once.A rich woman is left in the lurch after her new husband runs off with all of her possessions, she's kinda mean to "poor" people but she joins Bronco Billy's wild west show to get from A to B. Gradually becomes likable. Sometimes you wanna slap her lol.I agree with the previous comment, its good to see Clint play another role rather than the stereotypical cowboy. Watch it!! I'm gonna see if i can find it on DVD.

Bronco Billy McCoy is the poor man's Buffalo Bill Cody, the proprietor and star of a touring Wild West show, essentially a circus with a Western theme. Billy might dress like a cowboy, but in reality he is not even a Westerner; he was originally a New Jersey shoe salesman who has spent time in jail for the attempted murder of his unfaithful first wife. Two other stars of the show have criminal records- one for practising medicine without a licence, one for embezzlement- and a third has been on the run ever since deserting the Army during the Vietnam War.Billy has big ideas for his show, but the whole thing has a very amateurish air. One of his female assistants quits after he accidentally hits her in the leg during his knife-throwing act, another after she falls off his horse. He accidentally finds himself entangled with Antoinette, an heiress who has eloped but who has been abandoned by her husband. Antoinette's elopement was dictated not by love but by the terms of her late father's will, which provided that she will only inherit his money if she marries before the age of thirty. Her husband, John, is a fortune-hunting gigolo; his main attraction for Antoinette is that she needs a husband who is as mercenary as she is. Antoinette is reluctantly persuaded to become Billy's new assistant, but the two initially loathe one another. Of course, this being a romantic comedy, that means that they will eventually end up falling for one another.Antoinette is played by Sondra Locke, who was Eastwood's lover at the time. She starts off as cold, snobbish, sarcastic and foul-tempered before gradually mellowing; I wonder if her name was borrowed from the French queen who is popularly, although inaccurately, believed to have advised her starving subjects to eat cake. There is a similar development in another film from this period, "The Gauntlet", which also starred the two together. In that film also Locke's character starts off as foul-mouthed and shrewish and the two characters initially hate one another before falling in love. This casts an interesting light, to say the least, on the real-life relationship of Locke and Eastwood.There are some amusing scenes arising from the efforts of Antoinette's stepmother Irene, with the assistance of a conniving lawyer, to defraud her stepdaughter of her inheritance. At one point Antoinette, having gone missing, is believed to be dead, and John is persuaded by the promise of a large windfall to confess to her murder. (The lawyer assures him that if he pleads insanity he will only receive a few years in a mental institution). The film is, however, more than simply a rom-com. It also deals with the theme of the way in which the enduring legend of the Old West continued to influence American culture even in the late twentieth century.Clint Eastwood's Billy character has been described as a parody of the sort of Western heroes he played in films such as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" or "High Plains Drifter", but in fact he is both a parody of and a celebration of the traditional Western hero. Billy's stage persona is similar to that of Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger, the Western hero who tries to live by a simple moral code- honour, patriotism, decency, courage, truthfulness and (for the children) always do your schoolwork and respect your parents. Cinema Westerns of the sixties and seventies such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Lawman" had often taken a revisionist view of the Code of the West, trying to show that it was a myth. (Eastwood himself was later to make "Unforgiven", possibly the greatest of all revisionist Westerns). Of course, the Code of the West was a myth- not everyone in the West was honourable, patriotic, decent, courageous or truthful. The word "myth", however, in its original Greek sense, did not simply mean a falsehood. It meant a story which was not necessarily literally true but which had a deeper, symbolic significance. The significance of the Myth of the West for Billy is that he himself believes it. It is not merely a stage persona. He has his faults, but for the most part he does make a genuine effort to live by the code he preaches (which is why Antoinette, who has spent most of her life surrounded by phonies, ends up falling for him).In a scene at the end Billy and his troupe give their show, to the strains of a rousing Sousa march, in a tent symbolically made up of American flags stitched together. This indicates that this is a patriotic film, although this is not a gung-ho, military patriotism. Leonard, the Vietnam deserter, is treated sympathetically, which perhaps suggests that Eastwood is not the die-hard conservative he is sometimes assumed to be by both admirers and detractors. Rather, it is a wider patriotism celebrating the way in which America allows its citizens to reinvent themselves, to realise their full potential, to be whatever they want to be. Billy's circus may be small-scale and amateurish, but it has allowed Billy and his colleagues to live out their dreams. Billy, the shoe salesman with a criminal record has become, on his own terms at least, a sort of a hero. The Wild West Show thus functions as a microcosm of the Wild West itself, which in the nineteenth century allowed many Americans to make new lives for themselves, just as America has offered a fresh start in life to many people from other parts of the world.Until this film was recently shown by TCM as part of a Clint Eastwood season I had never seen it before; indeed, I had never heard of it. Having seen it, however, I am surprised it is not better-known, and can understand why Eastwood counts it among his favourites. 8/10