Tame Rovers

When TCM had its programming tribute to actor Ryan O'Neal a few months back, one of the movies I hadn't seen before was Wild Rovers. It's airing again tomorrow, May 31, at 8:00 AM, so I made a point of watching it before the upcoming airing to do a report on it.

Out in Montana in the days of the Old West, Walter Buckman (Karl Malden) runs a large cattle ranch together with his two sons (played by Tom Skerritt and Joe Don Baker), and a bunch of ranch hands. A ridiculously large number of ranch hands, I'd think, but that's not the point of the movie. One somewhat minor subplot is a conflict between Buckman and the neighboring sheep farmer over who can graze where. The bigger plot, however, is going to involve two of the ranch hands, the young Frank Post (Ryan O'Neal) and the too old to be doing this anymore hand, Ross Bodine (William Holden).

One day, a bunch of the hands are breaking horses, and one of the hands gets thrown off a horse to his death, necessitating the shooting of the horse. Frank and Ross go into town, presumably to deal with some of the necessities for the funeral, and get to talking. Frank is a bit surprised that Ross doesn't seem to have much money saved up, while Ross points out that pretty much every ranch hand lives his life in such a way that it's pretty much impossible to save up money. That is a bit of a shame, as Ross has always dreamed of going to Mexico where the American dollar goes much farther and it would be easier to start a ranch. With that in mind, Frank suggests that perhaps the only way to get the money to start one's own spread would be to rob a bank. It's just a joke, right?

While in town, Ross and Frank stop at the saloon to waste some of the money that they could be saving toward that ranch in Mexico, getting good and drunk on overpriced whiskey. The run into some of the men who work the sheepman's ranch, which results in a fight that causes a heck of a lot of damage to the saloon. This leaves Buckman mighty ticked off, and he plans to dock Ross and Frank their pay in order to pay off the damage on the saloon. So now perhaps the only way the two can get enough money to survive is to actually rob that bank.

The two do rob the bank, although they leave enough money behind for Buckman to make payroll in an attempt to get the bank owner not to aleart the authorities. They then set off for Mexico. It goes without saying, however, that Buckman learns about the robbery (and well, Frank and Ross would have stopped showing up for work, which would have been a huge red flag), so he sends a posse after them including his two sons. Bring Frank and Ross back, dead or alive. One son wants them back alive, the other seems itching to shoot them.

The movie was released after the demise of the Production Code, so at least it's not an absolute requirement that Frank and Ross get what's coming to them for breaking the law. It's possible they might actually get away with it. But they've got a long way to go, and they are going to have to deal with civilization along the way. That's where things go wrong, when Frank decides he's going to play poker with the locals one night and causes a gunfight....

The plot of Wild Rovers is serviceable, and the acting is certainly professional. And yet there's something seriously wrong with the movie. Well, two things. The first, which was quite evident, was the direction, by Blake Edwards, a director who was thoroughly out of his element making a western. Edwards decided to go for a whole bunch of early 1970s touches in his camerawork. Since there are gunfights, some people die, but the death scenes are done in a sort of slow-motion that some say is an homage to Sam Peckinpah, but to me seemed almost as amateurish as the deaths from bee sting in The Swarm. There's also a wild horses scene halfway through the movie that's handled with a whole bunch of double exposures and kills the movie harder than the bicycle scene set to "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It wasn't until after I watched Wild Rovers and read up on it that I learned that the movie was heavily edited, against Edwards' wishes. Supposedly, his vision would have had the movie run three hours, while the movie we have here, with overture, intermission, and exit music, is 136 minutes. Perhaps the subplot with the sheep rancher was more important in Edwards' original vision, but here it feels like an afterthought.

I could see what Blake Edwards was going for when he wrote the screenplay, but the Wild Rovers we get on the screen is sadly, an absolute mess.