Arthur Penn: New Edition

The Chase: Flashback, 1965

Rustling Up Robin Wood on The Missouri Breaks Times Educational Supplement, July 23, 1976, 46. The Missouri Breaks raises with particular vividness the problems of discussing authorship in the American commercial cinema. It is directed by Arthur Penn, who has a habit of taking over apparently heterogenous projects, often at a late stage in the elaboration of the script (The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde), and converting them, with only a minimum of structural alteration, into landmarks in a strikingly consistent development. The original screenplay this time is by Thomas McGuane, and in its outline it follows remarkably closely that of the recent Rancho Deluxe (1975), also written by McGuane but directed by Frank Perry. Beyond this, the film must be seen in the context of the overall development of the Western, the Hollywood cinema, and American civilization—of the social/cultural/ideological process in which individual work and individual artists are caught up. The plot similarities between the two films can be swiftly indicated ; they help to highlight the differences. The primary conflict in both is between a cattle baron and a group of rustlers. In both, the rustlers attempt to deceive the rancher by installing themselves right under his nose (in Rancho Deluxe by recruiting two of his men and in The Missouri Breaks by buying an adjacent ranch). After a particular outrage (the holding to ransom of a prize bull, the revenge murder of a foreman), the rancher brings in a recognized expert—in Perry’s film a “stock detective” (Slim Pickens) and in Penn’s a “Regulator” (Marlon Brando). A three-way conflict develops as the attempts by rustlers and expert to outwit each other are accompanied by growing tension between expert and rancher. In both cases, the expert appears to be 170 robin wood either idle or incompetent and antagonizes his employer with his arrogance ; in both, when the conflict erupts, the expert expresses his indifference about salary but insists on carrying out his job to its conclusion , as a matter of persona/professional pride. The most striking general common feature of the two scripts is McGuane’s tendency to conceive each episode in terms of some deliberately novel or eccentric idea. Perry, whose previous work (e.g., Diary of a Mad Housewife, 1970) has been consistently vulgar, facile, and opportunistic, executes Rancho Deluxe at precisely this level. Each scene is played for its potential cuteness, and the film generates no moral tension or resonance: the rustlers are amiable young men, the detective an endearingly crafty old one, and the film has no ambitions beyond casual amusement. The screenplay of The Missouri Breaks is in Rustler Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson) and rancher’s daughter Jane Braxton (Kathleen Lloyd). The Missouri Breaks. Rustling Up 171 itself more serious (the film opens with a hanging and culminates in a series of violent deaths; no one dies in Rancho Deluxe to disturb the predominantly comic tone); the degree to which Penn has infiltrated and made his own what is clearly a McGuane structural pattern remains remarkable. The central tension in Penn’s work has always been that between impulse and control: a tension, one might retort, central to the human condition, but it has always been invested by Penn with a particular intensity and, in the earlier films, an exact balance of sympathies (the Billy the Kid/Pat Garrett opposition of The Left Handed Gun, the marriage of instinct and reason in Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, the equal valuing of Bubber Reeves and Sheriff Calder in The Chase). The Chase (in Penn’s words, “more a Hollywood film than a Penn film”) marks a watershed both in his work and in the development of the American cinema: one of the first “apocalyptic” Hollywood films, it presents the disintegration of American capitalist society as irrevocable . From there on, Penn has moved consistently outside established society to search for alternative (and always extremely vulnerable) groups embodying values of freedom, generosity, spontaneity, a mutual human responsiveness: the Barrow gang of Bonnie and Clyde, the hippie community of Alice’s Restaurant, the Cheyennes of Little Big Man, the rustlers of The Missouri Breaks. This change of emphasis has been accompanied by a corresponding change of attitude to the figures embodying consciousness and control and dedicated to the preservation of the established order. The last such character presented sympathetically in a Penn film was Brando’s Calder in The Chase...