Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

If not for the performances of Nicholson, Quaid and Lloyd, this western would be completely forgettable. A very slow-paced (at least initially) picture that doesn't warrant more than one viewing. Its hard to believe in Brando's character based on his performance. You could remove his character from the movie and it wouldn't detract from the story.The cinematography is realistic and appropriate for this time period. The chemistry between Lloyd and Nicholson is intriguing and it would be interesting to see them act together in a different movie.Some decent laughs (the train robbery with Nicholson), but the plot is flawed and not that interesting. This movie doesn't crack my top 100 of westerns.

Rancher David Braxton has a horse rustling problem and he deals with it ruthlessly. His daughter Jane (Kathleen Lloyd) struggles with his father's cruelty. Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson) leads a band of horse thieves and one of his men just got hung by Braxton. The gang decides to rob a train since they're getting hung anyways but it's a comedic adventure when Logan almost falls off a bridge. Logan decides to take revenge on Braxton by flirting with his innocent daughter Jane, buying a small neighboring property, and stealing his stock. Logan's men kill the Braxton foreman and Braxton hires regulator Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando) to hunt down the thieves. Clayton is an odd man who quickly zeroes in on Logan. Meanwhile Logan's men goes to Canada to steal horses from the RCMP.It's a comedic revisionist western taking apart some of the iconic western characters. The comedic part is light and unfunny. This is a worthwhile watch simply for Marlon Brando's crazy performance. It is much derided at the time and I can see why. His problematic actor style is legendary now. His wildly unique character overshadows everyone else including a popular Jack Nicholson right after 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'. This movie must have built up unbearable hype and the disappointment is easy to imagine. The movie doesn't really hold together as a whole. The jokes aren't funny. Brando is all by himself. Nicholson tries his best but nobody can be expected to pull this off. At least he and Kathleen Lloyd have some fun flirty scenes together.

What was this about? I'll re-phrase that: what in tarnation was that all about? This was the on-screen reaction by the cow-pokes, ranchers, whatever, at the hanged man's funeral when Brando made his entry. Was he doused in a perfume of some sort? Or just flatulent? "Hanged", by the way, not "hung". Pictures are hung, men are hanged. Ask Braxton: he reads a lot. The accurate synopsis tells me that Braxton was homosexual, which was not something I'd really twigged; although I did suspect Brando, who was bizarre enough to be anything. Braxton was quite mad, anyway, so his wife had more than one reason for leaving him. Why did his daughter stay? Could the plot be described as off-kilter? Perhaps quirky would be another suitable epithet. The title was a puzzle from the start. Missouri is a river, right? How does it "break"? Or did I read that wrong? In any case, the title sheds no light on the story --- if there was one. OK, so the title of the movie refers to a forlorn and very rugged area of north central Montana, where over eons the Missouri River has made countless deep cuts or "breaks" in the land. Thank you, Wikipedia; but it's no help.Everything was distinctly odd, including the dialogue which managed to be simultaneously earthy and weird. Did girls proposition men in those words and that manner in the 1880s? This was the 1880s, wasn't it?Also, I thought it was normally the Malay States where they wear hats like plates. The hat didn't go well with the Shane-type jacket; and why was it changed for a granny bonnet, and where did the word "regulator" come from? Was this an improvement on "terminator"? "Operator" or "janitor"? Wasn't Billy the Kid a regulator?Nice pictures of horses running around the scenery. Was this movie alluding to "Cat Ballou"? If a gang can't move up to train-robbing from ordinary horse- or cattle-rustling there'd be no progress at all in the world. They would have to move down to Hole-in-the-Wall. You're not Jesse James. Not if you throw your bag of banknotes around like confetti. Was this a comedy without Hope? Lonesome Kid? Huh ? Parole after two weeks? Don't shoot a naked man in a bathtub, when you can cut his throat as he sleeps. Only Eli Wallach takes his gun into his bath with him. Did Brando harbour unnatural feelings for his horse? He drifted in from another flick about cuckoos. Jack was up-staged.I give up. One of the oddest if not the silliest movies I've ever seen. I did read that both star actors were astonishingly well paid for their appearances. I liked the girl. But I'm baffled.

Fun-loving criminal Jack Nicholson attempts to keep a low-profile by buying a ranch in order to launder stolen livestock. However, he begins to reconsider his thieving ways when he begins to romance the daughter of a local rancher. Soon he finds himself and his gang targeted by Marlon Brando, a very eccentric and very lethal hired gun.Though not as bad as some prominent critics would have you believe, nor as brilliant as others insist, this once in a lifetime pairing of Nicholson and Brando is a little bit disappointing.They're both pretty amusing (especially Brando), but don't really have much to do, at least until the final fifty-minutes or so when Brando gets busy. These two simply should have thrown off more sparks than they did!Still, this tongue-in-cheek, offbeat western has it's moments, just not as many as director Arthur Penn's Little Big Man.There's some good support from Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton, Frederick Forrest, and John P. Ryan, as Nicholson's gang.