Thomas McGuane's Westerners get plenty of weird, dislocated effects into their speech. They use stiff, formal, four-dollar words ("eligible," "effective," "mechanically minded," "the brain pan"), and they use images that represent a rather fanciful notion, on the author's part, of the picturesqueness of American language ("as slick as snot on a doorknob"). For all that, McGuane's Western is absolutely conventional in structure: the rascally horse thieves, the civilized capitalist in his prairie palace ("Pull down Tristram Shandy again for me, will you?"), his well-bred pacifist daughter, her romance with a charismatic outlaw, the ominous arrival of a legendary hired killer, etc. The Montana scenery is beautiful and bountiful, but there is nothing very special about this movie beyond the ballyhooed fact that it brings together, for the first time, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, the brooding 1950s rebel chieftain and his braying 1970s successor. Directed by Arthur Penn. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.