RoughneckPaycheck

This is worth a watch if you are a fan of the more adult-themed westerns of the 1950s. But whose bright idea was it to put Cassavetes in a movie like this? It's a helluva weird choice. His acting style is so different from that of his co-star Robert Taylor that the film barely holds together.

To his credit, Cassavetes shoots for veracity, for a naturalism that brings humanity to a character that could've easily become a cardboard cutout of a psycho. In some ways, he is elevating the worn out clichés of the script, bringing some real life to them. But other aspects of his performance are flat absurd. For example, he periodically attempts some sort of ridiculous "western" accent, then just as quickly he'll drop it; sometimes this happens within a single line of dialog. You can take the boy out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy, and I never bought for an instant that he was a tough western ranch kid with lingering Confederate sympathies. And his mood swings, as he goes rapidly from giggling to brooding, are hyper and overdone.

Meanwhile, Taylor is all classic Hollywood "strong & silent type" understatement, bordering on wooden and inexpressive. Their scenes together are oil and water. It brought me out of the story, into awareness that I was watching two actors who shouldn't be sharing the stage together. Their aesthetics are just too different.

In the plus column, supporting character actor Royal Dano is amazing in this movie, utterly convincing as a squatter with lingering Civil War resentments and a legal claim on a piece of land that puts him in direct conflict with the area ranchers. There are some brutal, squirm-inducing, standout scenes where Cassavetes terrorizes Dano. These are really subversive in a way, as Cassavetes' character takes on a role usually reserved for Indians, nameless "Others" who are utterly inhuman and dispensable.

I was also pleasantly surprised at Julie London's performance. She has a few key scenes early in the film and does a fine job, but she's underutilized; her character is sketched quickly, then left underdeveloped as her story thread is largely dropped.

Overall, this could've been a lot better, but it holds some interest for those with a particular love for the sub-genre. And Cassavetes fans will find much to like about his performance, at least for curiosity's sake.

A muddled film that reminds me of Frank Sinatra vehicle "The Detective" released the same year. Both movies augment tough, realistic, location-shot police procedural material with stagy drama from their cops' personal lives, and both attempt to deal with adult sexual issues in a frank & forthright manner. And they both largely miss the mark: the personal drama doesn't integrate well with the action-oriented police-work, and the sexual frankness is awkward and badly dated. That said, this movie does have its pleasures.

Widmark is very good, if a bit too old for the part. He brings an element of volatility to his character, and makes Madigan's seeming contradictions (nasty one minute, compassionate the next) wholly credible.

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent. Watch for the wild, hammy, but engaging bit parts played by Michael Dunn as a shady little person informer, Don Stroud as a petulant, sleazy pimp, and Steve Ihnat as the crazed killer. The scenes with these three characters are some of the sharpest in the film, little set pieces that really bring the proceedings to life.

Fonda's role is a tougher assignment. His character is an intimidating, implacable moral absolutist, a man of few words who processes events internally. In the course of the film he runs into a variety of moral dilemmas, and has to make decisions about them. So how would an actor communicate what's roiling within this character? Beats me, because Fonda didn't do it. He walks through every scene stone-faced, and his decisions seem utterly random. He played this so understated that no statement is made at all.

And the less said about the personal drama love interest scenes the better. Though Inger Stevens and Susan Clark do their best with their thin roles, this stuff kills the pacing of the main story threads. Stevens role as Madigan's wife is there largely to give the story's ending some emotional kick, but it just ain't happening.

The climactic shootout scene at the end is brutal and utterly convincing. Siegel could do compelling action scenes with the best of them. This little bit of the movie is truly great.

So yeah, it's a flawed film, but die-hard fans of crime & police drama, Siegel, and/or Widmark should check this out anyway.

First the bad: sudden, jarring changes in tone. It veers abruptly from grim, bitter drama to clever caper movie to unfunny comedy. These shifts are badly exacerbated by the messy, eclectic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink score, which all too often comments on scenes in ways I found ill-fitting and inappropriate. A couple of examples: an early scene in which Jesse riles up the boys by going into a feverish Southern preacher mode, to get them fired up for the titular bank job, is turned from creepy and compelling into light-hearted comedy by the wacky music behind it; similarly, late in the film, a citizen posse chasing the gang commits an atrocity on four innocent men, and the music again makes light of it, with an ironic silly 'wah wah wah'. Just awful. What were they thinking? Also bad, an interminable scene of a raucous baseball game comes out of nowhere and drags on and on with utterly unfunny slapstick. The subplot with the Pinkertons adds next to nothing. The cinematography is too often flat and TV-like.

Now the good, and the reasons I gave this a 7 anyway: excellent performances from Robertson and Duvall and the supporting cast, and a very strong screenplay, well-paced, with believable characters whose individual traits are clearly delineated. Cole Younger is a crafty pragmatist, keenly interested in modernity as represented by machinery, ready to leave criminality behind and change with the times; Jesse James is shown as his opposite, an embittered true believer in the Confederate cause, who uses that belief as justification for continued criminal violence. In this theme of men unable to change with the times, the film is akin to some of Peckinpah's work.

Also good are fundamentals like art direction, locations, costuming, and set design. This is all handled with grubby veracity, in the same vein as other films from around the same time like "McCabe and Mrs. Miller". It really excels here.

On the whole, the character-driven, group-dynamic elements of the story are so fully realized that they make the movie compelling and worth watching in spite of its tonal flaws.