Kid Blue

A movie that started showing up in the FXM rotation relatively recently is Kid Blue. I DVRed it, and since it's on again tomorrow morning at 11:45 and again at 9:50 AM Monday, I decided to watch it now to do a blog post on.

Dennis Hopper plays the titular Kid Blue, real name Bickford Waner. In the movie's opening scene he's leading a gang of outlaws in a robbery of a moving train in the late 1890s. Except that this is the gang that couldn't shoot straight, as it falls at the first hurdle -- and you get the impression this isn't the first attempted robbery that's gone badly wrong.

So Bick decides that he's going to try to go straight, since robbing trains clearly isn't working. He makes his way to the town of Dime Box, TX, where he begins to look for a job. The sheriff, nicknamed "Mean John" (Ben Johnson), isn't so sure about Bick. More accepting is crazy Preacher Bob (Peter Boyle), who is working on a human-powered airplane he calls the "aerocycle", real airplanes not having been invented yet so that Bob couldn't 100% know that human-powered planes are a fool's errand.

Eventually, Bick gets a job at the growing town's biggest employer, a ceramics factory producing kitsch and run by Hendricks (Clifton James). This brings Bick into contact with a co-worker, Reese Ford (Warren Oates), and his wife Molly (Lee Purcell). Both of the Fords have some odd ideas, as Reese tries to get Bick to take a bath with him, not wanting to waste the hot water, while Molly winds up seducing Bick.

But Bick has that past, and it's going to come back for him, in the form of Janet (Janice Rule). She's passing herself off as an actress, coming from Dallas, where Bick claims his girlfriend is from. Janet knows Bick, and knows that he used to be Kid Blue. Worse, she spills the beans to Reese, which is strike one for Bick. Strike two is that Reese learns of the relationship between Bick and Molly.

It's all enough for Bick to decide that going straight isn't going to work for him, so why not rob the payroll from his boss' factory? Perhaps he should have remembered that he wasn't very competent in his previous stint as an outlaw thief.

Kid Blue is one of those 1970s westerns that form a genre that I've found I'm not the biggest fan of. I was never the biggest fan of westerns in general, although I've warmed to Code-era stuff. As for the 70s westerns, it's not the "revisionist" nature of the westerns that makes me like them less, but the fact that most of the ones I've seen come across as meandering and self-indulgent. A big part of the big problem with Kid Blue is that it feels like it's not going anywhere, with characters who seem drawn as quirky only because now that the Production Code is gone, we can make them quirkier than ever and get away with it. It doesn't really work here.

People who like Dennis Hopper or Warren Oates will probably like this one; for other people I'd probably suggest starting with earlier westerns. Kid Blue got a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, but I don't know the status of their scheme since the takeover by Disney. The movie seems to be available currently on Amazon Prime video if you do the streaming thing.