Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Bad Company
DVD Review
Bad Company, Jeff Bridges, Barry Brown, directed by Robert Benton, Universal, 1972
No, I am not going to start off this piece by going on and on about how Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance in Crazy Hearts as down-and-out country singer/songwriter Bad Blake was merely an extension of him as a modern young Texas dude, Duane Jackson, in Peter Bogdanovitch’s film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. Although, now that I think about it, I could. Rather, though I want to use my time to look at this film, Bad Company, as an example of that then (1972) fairly new look at the old American West through other than rose-colored glasses.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Wild Bunch are probably better known, and rightly so, for breaking down the black and white view of the old wild West that those of us who came of age in the dawn of the television era (black and white television, to boot) of the early 1950s and formed our view of the “cowboys and Indians” from the seemingly endless Westerns that ran on Saturday morning (and Saturday afternoon at the movie house, alternating with scary horror or monster movies). The good guys wore white, the bad guys black and the Indians, well, it was kind of left unsaid but the only good one was a dead one. The above mentioned films, this film, and writers like McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy helped to bring some realism, some naturalism to the layers of myth and mis-history.
Take the plot of Bad Company. A young man (Barry Brown), the hero of the film or rather better the anti-hero, of good Ohio family, aided and abetted by that family, is furnished with the means to avoid being conscripted into the Union Army during the later stages of the American Civil War. Said naïve young man learns the lessons of survival in the rough and tumble West before he even gets past Missouri. From there, aided by roustabout and ne’er-do-well Jeff Bridges (being, well, prankster Jeff Bridges), and his gang, he pushes on trying, trying against all odds to keep on the right side of the law (read: frontier justice, not necessarily the same thing). In the end, he does what he has to do to survive. Old Gene Autry, old Hop-along Cassidy, old Roy Rogers might not have been able to fathom that, but you and I can.
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