How lo Steal a Movie

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE MISSOURI BREAKS

Directed by ARTHUR PENN

Screenplay by THOMAS McGUANE

In the course of portraying a psychopathic "regulator"--a hired gun charged by a Montana cattle baron with ridding his range of rustlers--Marlon Brando employs three distinct accents and wears, among other exotic items, a gorgeously fringed buckskin jacket, a coolie's hat and, finally, a grandmotherly gingham dress with a poke bonnet. Obviously, his performance in The Missouri Breaks does not suffer from an excess of discipline. Indeed, it is fair to say that it is gaudy and disruptive to the balance of forces Director Penn must surely have wanted to maintain between Brando and Jack Nicholson, the man regarded as Brando's likely successor as the best and most powerful actor in films. Nicholson, who plays the leader of the outlaw band that Brando is tracking, develops with restraint a portrayal of a man moving almost unconsciously from raunchiness to respectability.

Yet the picture belongs to Brando. The crazy daring, the reckless bravado of his work simply overpowers everything else on the screen. You groan, you shake your head, you laugh wildly at each new lunacy, but you cannot help being fascinated by the man. In the gloomy middle years of his career, he used to demonstrate his contempt for the medium by giving the smallest part of his talents. Now he has apparently decided to give too much, to parody himself. His work in Missouri Breaks is not so much a performance as it is a finger thrust joyously upward by an actor who has survived everything, including his own self-destructive impulses.

While the picture belongs to Brando, it is a nice question whether The Missouri Breaks is worth owning. Penn has peopled it with interesting, unfamiliar faces, and shot it with obviously strong feelings for the landscape and period detail of the 1880s. Yet the strong technique is enlisted in the service of a very modest irony that has become one of the basic banalities of the modern western. Once again, the works of nature are shown to have grandeur and innocence, while the works of man are everywhere perceived as squalid pollutants.

The director's limits match all too well the shortcomings of his writer. McGuane has just one small, familiar idea to toy to death. It is that those who uphold the law are less delightful, what with their hypocrisy and all, than his merry band of outlaws. They demonstrate exemplary camaraderie and a shrewd aw-shucks kind of existential humor. It does not really help much that this funny stuff is juxtaposed with sud denbursts of the most brutal violence, thus demonstrating that whatever grace notes we find in life, a rather grubby mortality always has its stinger out.

McGuane gives his major actors only one effective scene when a vengeful Nicholson has Brando at his mercy in a bathtub and lets him go. But far from satisfying the audience, it leaves it wishing for more. McGuane's is an essentially adolescent sensibility, tough-talking but sentimental about how nasty death keeps intruding on his good ole boys. In the circumstances, one comes to admire Brando even more. Apparently, he was the only major participant in the project to see that it was a load of nonsense and that the only honorable course was to send it up. His efforts along that line -- bless his heart -- are an act of creative subversion and provide moviegoers with the one reason for seeing the film.

Richard Schickel

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