Goin' South

Some time back, during one of the free preview weekends, I was able to DVR the comic western Goin' South. I finally got around to watching it recently to do a review here.

Jack Nicholson plays Henry Moon, who at the start of the movie is fleeing south through Texas toward Mexico, with the sheriff (Richard Bradford) leading a bunch of men chasing Moon. Moon crosses the Rio Grande, which means going into Mexico, and thinks he's gotten away. But either that's not the Rio Grande, or the sheriff just doesn't care about jurisdiction and crosses the river to apprehend Moon.

Moon is sentenced to hang, but the town where he's held, Longhorn TX, has an interesting law. This is the era just after the Civil War, and marriageable men are apparently in short supply. So men can avoid the gallows if an unmarried woman in the town offers to marry the condemned man, and the two can stay married. Julia Tate (Mary Steenburgen) is just such a woman, and she says she'll marry Moon.

Naturally, she has ulterior motives for marrying Moon, which is that her father had set up a small mine on the land he owned and bequeathed to her, and Julia is convinced that her father was right in his assertion that there is gold on the property. She wants to marry Moon because she needs somebody to dig for gold, not because she loves Moon.

Indeed, the lack of love between the two leads is a source of tension between the two throughout the movie, although things do soften somewhat over the course of the movie. But even when it turns out that Julia's father was correct and there is in fact gold on the property, there's tension over how much each of the two gets.

And that's not the only problem. Looming in the background is the fact that there's a railroad that wants to buy up land for a right-of-way to build a new railroad, and good luck trying to mine on railroad land. (Other farmers are willing to sell largely because there's oil bubbling up that they don't know what it is.) Perhaps more pressing is Moon's past. He wasn't a lone horse thief, but part of a band of outlaws, having served first with Quantrill's raiders (or so he claims) and then, after the Civil War ended, joining up with a gang. They eventually show up, knowing that something must be going on for him not to have been hanged.

I basically only mentioned Nicholson and Steenburgen out of the cast, and that's largely because they're the two who come off best in the movie. If I had to give a reason for that, I think it comes down to Nicholson, who also directed. He seems not to know how to use his actors in the material, with the results being underused (Christopher Lloyd as one of the deputies) to the sort of obnoxious that you want to tell to shut up (John Belushi playing to every stereotype as a Mexican-American sheriff's deputy).

The scenery is nice, having been filmed in Durango like a lot of westerns, and the music is suitably offbeat for a romantic comedy western , but in my mind I don't think these positives were enough to outweigh the negatives from the direction. The movie was a critical and commercial flop on release and I personally can see why. Still, Goin' South has gained in reputation over the last 40 years, so this is definitely another one that you're going to want to watch for yourself.