Prairie Dogs

BAD COMPANY

Directed by ROBERT BENTON

Screenplay by DAVID NEWMAN and ROBERT BENTON

The glories of patriotism have never quite got through to Drew Dixon (Barry Brown), who had a brother killed at Chickamauga. Little wonder that when the Union Army passes through Greenville, Ohio, pressing unwilling recruits into service, Drew hides under a table, then speeds off to Missouri.

He gets as far as St. Joseph before throwing in with a band of rapscallions on their way West. Drew takes overbearing pride in being an upright Methodist. He struggles to stay on the straight and narrow as his cronies teach him to lie, to steal, to live by his wits and, those failing, his gun. His principles are most frequently mocked and compromised by the gang leader (Jeff Bridges), with whom he strikes up the kind of mutually antagonistic friendship often found in such films of Howard Hawks as Rio Bravo and Red River. Each member of the gang has sworn to share with the others, but as his companions scrounge for a meal--and sometimes get killed in the process--Drew keeps $100 stashed in his shoe. The bankroll makes his lofty moral principles a great deal easier to hold.

Benton's directorial debut, Bad Company is very much in the same hokey picaresque tradition as Bonnie and Clyde and There Was a Crooked Man, for which Benton and Newman contributed characteristically jaunty scripts.

Bad Company makes a point of debunking assorted myths of the Old West and the glorious pioneer tradition, all in a congenial, chiding sort of way that begins to wear long before the last scene.

Smart and fast at its best, Bad Company too often turns arch, and its characters are self-consciously countrified, like admen going to work in bib overalls. Their dialogue has the somewhat disconcerting ring of Huckleberry Finn rewritten for New Yorker cartoon captions. Benton's direction, though, is astonishingly adept for a first feature, while Brown and Bridges make an engagingly boisterous pair. The cinematography is by Gordon Willis (The Godfather), who for reasons unknown has chosen to make everything and every one look brown.

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