Misunderstood 'Missouri Breaks' has gotten better with age

If the 1976 western The Missouri Breaks is remembered at all its usually because it was a infamous flop for its A-list stars (Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando) who were both coming off the biggest hits of their careers and because of Brando's undeniably eccentric performance as an effeminate assassin with a toothache.

Today, not burdened with the expectations of being a follow-up to The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the movie holds up as a peculiar, fascinating revisionist western whose commentary on class fits neatly within the oeuvre of its acclaimed director -- Arthur Penn.

In his best films, like Bonnie and Clyde and Night Moves, Penn proved expert at subverting our expectations and deconstructing the cliches that genre films usually embrace.

With The Missouri Breaks he has a premise that could be deemed generic not downright banal: Nicholson and a team of bandits are making ends meet by stealing horses and when a rich homesteader gets fed up with their antics he dispatches a 'regulator' to take them out one by one.

For some of its running time, the film is an amiable if a bit meandering comedy, with an almost Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-style temperament. But unlike that film, darkness is always creeping in. John Williams' terrific score underlines this juxtaposition; it's by turns jaunty and joyful and then ominous.

Nicholson goes very Method here, really giving an authentic, realistic performance as a striving man who wants a foothold in mainstream society but can't shake his bad boy bonafides. He engages in a romance with the main villain's daughter that is doomed from the start and he is relatively helpless as his friends succumb in increasingly brutal ways to the whims of Brando's killer.

Brando on the other hand gives a performance that is undeniably surreal but still Nicholson's equal in every way. At the time of the film's release his bizarre choices were viewed as indulgent, and perhaps they are, but they don't detract from the continuity of the film.

His Robert E. Lee Clayton (a character very aptly named) is a bit of a madman, and albeit a sadistic one. He shares some DNA with Javier Bardem's character in No Country for Old Men, except he appears to have his own peculiar sense of humor.

While he and Nicholson don't share the screen much, when they do the tension between their styles is electric and whatever bitterness that may have existed for the two on set actually helps to serve their scenes together.

Still, this film is not interested in marching towards some inevitable shootout on a dusty main street, which is perhaps why audiences back in 1976 were so confounded by it. It's a film interested in moving diagonally instead of forwards or backwards, and I appreciate Penn's willingness to craft a strange western, since its a genre that can often be bogged down by its conventionality.

Take for instance a scene that takes place in a whorehouse. Scenes like this seem to exist in every post-code western movie. But unlike any others I've seen, The Missouri Breaks presents one that is downbeat and unappealing as any establishment probably would have been at the time.

The dialogue is also almost Coen Brothers-esque in its complexity. There are no straightforward declarations here of heroism or villainy. There is a sense that everyone is under the thumb of people who make more than them, even the daughter of a rich man, and in that every man for himself world of the west you have to grab what pleasures you can, while you can.

For Brando's character, apparently, that involves dabbling in cross-dressing and feeding his horse carrots with his mouth. Wild choices to be sure, but how boring would this character had been if Brando had played him as tough talking badass, instead of the unpredictable dandy we get here.

The Missouri Breaks is no masterpiece, but it is a testament to the freedom '70s filmmakers briefly had, to let their freak flags fly.