It is 1976, bicentennial year, when this film comes out, and the New Hollywood has taken a rueful stance. Previously Nashville, Chinatown, the Sam Peckinpah Westerns, The Last Picture Show speak to the dying down of the American spirit, a disillusionment with the era, now into its post-Watergate phase.
Missouri "breaks" - true enough. Good title. Everything breaks up. And the film breaks all the rules. Marlon Brando in particular is willfully arrogant (also in his public image in the press at the time, disdainful of Oscar and Hollywood racism). He gives an outrageous, out-of-control performance as a maniac known as a Regulator (or bounty hunter) come to wipe out a gang of Montana horse thieves led by Jack Nicholson.
His name "Robert E. Lee Clayton" suggests a fallen aristocracy that originates in the East after the Civil War - the 'breaks' in Southern aristocracy move westward.
The people here have nowhere to go, no pattern or purpose. They are listless in a cloudy grey landscape, and continually dark interiors. Intensely photographed by Michael Butler, The Missouri Breaks creates a feeling of lost dreams inherent in the very landscape itself. The frontier is inert, paralyzed. Suitably, the land baron suffers a debilitating stroke himself at the end of the film.
Into this social order comes Brando, totally unstable, with a level of disruption and craziness never before seen in a Western. In cultural tradition, he is part Confidence Man, part Joker; in modern psychology he's a psycho-sadist killer without human feeling. Our attitude is one of disgust and impatience - he keeps moving further and further from any kind of coherent explanation, dispensing with cruel flippancy the comparatively likeable rustlers one by one -- and then he greets joyfully his own execution.
The Brando figure here may be a precursor of the serial killer emerging in the American cinema - Jason, Michael Myers, Freddy.
This is a new kind of Western - loony, inhumane, wanton, debauched, a desecration of the old frontier. At the end, Nicholson as the garden-farmer Logan wisely packs up and sets off to find another West.
Audiences did not respond. This was a commercial bomb at the time, even with stars Brando and Nicholson just completing enormous popular success. Brando recuperates with Superman, Nicholson not until The Shining in 1980. Unfortunately for the American cinema, Arthur Penn never finds his prestigious position again.
Missouri "breaks" - true enough. Good title. Everything breaks up. And the film breaks all the rules. Marlon Brando in particular is willfully arrogant (also in his public image in the press at the time, disdainful of Oscar and Hollywood racism). He gives an outrageous, out-of-control performance as a maniac known as a Regulator (or bounty hunter) come to wipe out a gang of Montana horse thieves led by Jack Nicholson.
His name "Robert E. Lee Clayton" suggests a fallen aristocracy that originates in the East after the Civil War - the 'breaks' in Southern aristocracy move westward.
The people here have nowhere to go, no pattern or purpose. They are listless in a cloudy grey landscape, and continually dark interiors. Intensely photographed by Michael Butler, The Missouri Breaks creates a feeling of lost dreams inherent in the very landscape itself. The frontier is inert, paralyzed. Suitably, the land baron suffers a debilitating stroke himself at the end of the film.
Into this social order comes Brando, totally unstable, with a level of disruption and craziness never before seen in a Western. In cultural tradition, he is part Confidence Man, part Joker; in modern psychology he's a psycho-sadist killer without human feeling. Our attitude is one of disgust and impatience - he keeps moving further and further from any kind of coherent explanation, dispensing with cruel flippancy the comparatively likeable rustlers one by one -- and then he greets joyfully his own execution.
The Brando figure here may be a precursor of the serial killer emerging in the American cinema - Jason, Michael Myers, Freddy.
This is a new kind of Western - loony, inhumane, wanton, debauched, a desecration of the old frontier. At the end, Nicholson as the garden-farmer Logan wisely packs up and sets off to find another West.
Audiences did not respond. This was a commercial bomb at the time, even with stars Brando and Nicholson just completing enormous popular success. Brando recuperates with Superman, Nicholson not until The Shining in 1980. Unfortunately for the American cinema, Arthur Penn never finds his prestigious position again.