BEFORE: I've reached the end of my Western chain, just in time if you ask me. Linking from "Heaven's Gate", Mickey Rourke was also in "The Pledge" with Jack Nicholson (last seen in "Anger Management", I think - it's been a long while since ol' Jack's been in the countdown, but that's because I watched most of his films in a chain devoted to him.)
THE PLOT: Tom Logan is a horse thief. Rancher David Braxton has horses, and a daughter, worth stealing. But Braxton has just hired Lee Clayton, an infamous "regulator", to hunt down the horse thieves; one at a time.
AFTER: Another mysterious title - the film is set in Montana, not Missouri, but the Missouri River starts up in Montana, and it apparently leaves these deep cuts in the landscape, and those are the Breaks. See, I learn something every night.
I had a tough time with this film at first, fell asleep after the first half-hour and then made a couple of attempts to rewind and pick up where I left off, but this just made things to hard to follow. I regrouped the following morning and watched the last 90 minutes at work, and this was the right choice - it was a lot easier for me to tell what was going on. I'm apparently tired and stressed out, and my comfy couch is not a good location for making it through a whole film.
This process was not helped by Marlon Brando's character, who dons a number of disguises and accents in order to track down and take out a gang of horse thieves. He sounds Irish, he sounds Western, and if you wake up and see Brando in a dress, you might not know what's going on. For a while I just thought Brando was being weird (and maybe he was...) but there was a point to it all.
Who knew there were so many films about stealing cattle and horses? I managed to find one from the 1990's, the 1980's, and this one's from the 1970's. This was another one of those happy little accidents of planning. (There were a lot of other commonalities - land barons, frontier prostitutes, a love triangle - but I think these are common to many Westerns) I can't really draw any conclusions about filmmaking in general, except to point out that the tech of filmmaking has gotten better over the decades, but we already knew that.
This became a tight little film about the conflict between two men trying to outsmart each other. One's got detective/tracking skills and a long-range rifle, the other's got his wits and a criminal mind, so go ahead and take bets on who's going to come out on top. I think this is perhaps an underrated little film, but an awkward ending and bleak circumstances prevent it from scoring higher on my scale.
Speaking of "Breaks", I'm giving myself one after this - the New York Comic Con starts tomorrow, so I've got to load in merchandise later today (always a chore) and then I'll be basically living in the convention center for the next 4 days. I can eat there and I'll have enough time to go home and sleep, but no time for movies. So I'll come back to the project next week for a reduced workload.
Also starring Marlon Brando (last seen in "Mutiny on the Bounty"), Randy Quaid (last seen in "Quick Change"), Kathleen Lloyd, John McLiam, Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "Wild at Heart"), Frederic Forrest (last seen in "All the King's Men").
RATING: 4 out of 10 Mounties
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