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Robert Benton’s Bad Company does for the western what Bonnie and Clyde, Benton’s earlier collaboration with screenwriter David Newman, did for the gangster movie, only without that film’s veneer of star-powered sex appeal. The scrappier Bad Company consistently undermines the romanticized notions of the frontier that underpinned several generations of genre filmmaking. The film especially takes direct aim at two of our nation’s dearest held myths: the Horatio Alger notion of economic self-sufficiency, and the destiny of political expansion manifest in Horace Greeley’s famous dictum: “Go west, young man!”

The film is also decidedly of a piece with the year of its release in 1972, evident from the very first scene, wherein we see a young man dragged kicking and screaming from his home by blue-clad Army soldiers to be conscripted into the Union cause. The moment is given a surreal punchline by the fact that...

Warner Brothers released “Casablanca” in New York on Nov. 26, 1942, which just happened to be Thanksgiving. But the romantic World War II drama starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid was anything but a turkey. To say the New York Times review was effusive is something of an understatement: “Warners here have a picture which makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap….And they have so combined sentiment, humor and pathos with taut melodrama and bristling intrigue that the result is a highly entertaining and even inspiring film.”

And critical praise and audiences’ adoration continued when it opened in Los Angeles and nationwide in January 1943. It went on to win three Oscars for Best Picture, director for Michael Curtiz and adapted screenplay for Julius J. and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. Let’s take a look back on the occasion of the 80th anniversary.

As time has gone by,...