Father and Sons

By J.C.

JUNIOR BONNER

Directed by SAM PECKINPAH Screenplay by JEB ROSENBROOK

The frontier is gone, the West is closing in on itself, there is no room left for the old ways. No one has watched these changes with such deep understanding or portrayed them so memorably as Sam Peckinpah, whose westerns, from Ride the High Country through The Ballad of Cable Hogue all seem to be infused with a kind of sunset light. They concern men living stubbornly in the middle of change, hanging on, scarcely surviving. "We got to look beyond our guns," one of the outlaws says in The Wild Bunch, Peckinpah's greatest film. Everyone agrees, but no man among them can adapt, so they die by the code of an earlier time rather than live by the law of a new one.

Junior Banner is Peckinpah's most contemporary western, set in Prescott, Ariz., a town that hews to the traditions of the past by holding a rodeo every year even as its outskirts are being bulldozed for a housing development. Ace (Robert Preston) used to be a champ, a great bull rider who once performed in Madison Square Garden and talked to Jack Dempsey as one champion to another. Now he devotes most of his time to hustling up a stake.

His boy Curly (Joe Don Baker) gave him a fast $15,000 for the rights to raze the family shack and extend Curly's housing development. Ace blew it all mining in Nevada, "20 feet from the mother lode," but he is fed up anyway and wants to move on to Australia.

Ace's other son Junior (Steve McQueen) is a rodeo rider with a single obsession: to ride an especially violent bull, a feat that will spell his father's long shadow. Incredibly, Junior triumphs, buys Ace a one-way ticket to Australia and then blows town, letting his father look for a new frontier while Brother Curly plows the old one under.

This is the third in the current bumper crop of rodeo movies (J.W.

Coop and The Honkers have already been released, with When the Legends Die yet to come), so there is a certain fa miliarity in atmosphere and incident.

Even if Peckinpah's had been first, though, Junior Bonner would still be lackluster stuff. The dialogue is straight Grand Ole Opry, and Peckinpah tries to make it work by underplaying everything, which is like turning down the volume on a bad record instead of switching it off.

Maybe Peckinpah told the wrong story. To judge from Junior Bonner, he has little love for the West, and little interest in it. He apparently felt obliged to make some kind of comment on it, but like Ace, his heart lies somewhere else -- in the past, or maybe in Australia. Ace Bonner in the outback -- there's the real movie.

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