Drive-In ’76: ‘The Missouri Breaks,’ ‘Grizzly,’ ‘The Stranger and the Gunfighter,’ ‘Don’t Open the Window’

Each month, from April through September, Drive-In ’76 revisits the drive-in fare fifty years past, from big Hollywood releases to low-budget exploitation movies that played in the wee hours of the night. Stock up at the concession stand because we’ve got a quadruple feature lined up for May.

Feature One: The Missouri Breaks (released May 26, 1976)

The night kicks off with a major motion picture.

For his follow-up to Night Moves, Arthur Penn chose to make a movie demythologizing the Old West. It might have been more successful if other movies, including some of Penn’s own, hadn’t already so effectively performed the same task. Penn’s 1958 debut The Left Handed Gun cast Paul Newman as a Billy the Kid driven more by his own neuroses than a desire to be the baddest gun in town. His Little Big Man recast the story of the Old West as a tale of genocidal expansion filled with scenes designed to bring to mind the war in Vietnam. Scripted by novelist Thomas McGuane, The Missouri Breaks similarly, if less memorably, attempts to connect the dots between America’s past and present. Echoing Nixon and others, land baron David Braxton (John McLiam) wraps himself in a call for “law and order” in an attempt to consolidate his hold over a stretch of the Montana frontier, no matter how many outlaws he has to kill in the process. His reasoning, located just beneath the veneer of drawing a line between right and wrong: they eat into his bottom line too much.

It’s a rich set-up made even richer by Braxton’s chief opponents: a colorful gang of rustlers, led by Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), who make it their mission to harass and undermine Braxton after he hangs one of their own. Nicholson’s in typically fine ’70s form here in his first role since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and it’s a pleasure to watch him work opposite Frederic Forrest, Harry Dean Stanton, and his Last Detail co-star Randy Quaid, who play the other members of the gang. The film has an agreeable, picturesque looseness, highlighted by an early-film bank robbery that goes wrong, but not that wrong.

That The Missouri Breaks feels minor in comparison to Penn’s past films and similar then-recent efforts like Bad Company and McCabe and Mrs. Miller is The Missouri Breaks’ second biggest problem.* Its biggest problem is Marlon Brando, who plays the jovial but pitiless hired gun “regulator” Robert E. Lee Clayton with a twinkle in his eye and a thick, unconvincing Irish accent that makes the character seem more silly than threatening. And, unfortunately, since Lee is also a self-styled master of disguise, it’s just one of a few accents Brando tries on. This was Brando’s first role since a 1972 comeback that included both The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. It was as if he spent the years between trying to turn into Peter Sellers. 

[* A United Artists release, it also brings to mind Heaven’s Gate, which tells a similar story in a far grander style. Tales of The Missouri Breaks’ chaotic-sounding production suggests no lessons were learned in the years between.]