Bronco Billy (1980)

BRONCO BILLY  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Clint Eastwood
    Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Scatman Crothers,
    Geoffrey Lewis, Bill McKinney, Sam Bottoms,
    Dan Vadis, Sierra Pecheur, Hank Worden
Eastwood Americana, with Clint as Bronco Billy McCoy, the star and proprietor of a ragtag Wild West show. Eastwood led an itinerant existence for much of his early life, and it's interesting how many of his films, especially from the '70s and '80s, are road movies with various bands of misfit characters forming extended families and moving from place to place. In this one, most of the performers in Billy's show, including Billy himself, are ex-cons, and in some way, they've all bought into Billy's homespun philosophy of personal reinvention. That the enterprise they've reinvented themselves in is a touring anachronism with no economic future doesn't seem to matter to any of them. Memorable moments: Billy backing down in a standoff with an overbearing sheriff to spring his rope artist, an Army deserter, from jail. Billy on horseback, trying and failing to rob an indifferently speeding train. And the company's climactic performance, in a giant tent made in a mental institution out of stitched-together American flags. It's about as loose and laid-back as the country songs that turn up on the soundtrack, but there's a streak of subversion running through it, too, a kind of good-natured outlaw spirit that America wouldn't be America without. "Are you for real?" Sondra Locke asks Billy at one point. "I'm who I want to be," he replies. If you want to know where Eastwood's coming from, as a kid growing up on the road, or an artist later on making movies about it, you've got to watch "Bronco Billy".