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The cowboy in the city, a joke cultivated meticulously out of Twain and Capra to give a prime snapshot of the whole 1968 megillah. Navajo fugitive in the Arizona desert lays the groundwork for the Western analysis, Clint Eastwood as the deputy sheriff arrives by jeep and follows a bit of police brutality with some casual romping. Don Siegel wastes no time in getting this slit-eyed square to New York, just the place to extradite an LSD-fried longhair (Don Stroud) and play straight man to a menagerie of flakes and freaks. Tex, he's called, also Wyatt and Hoot Gibson and Buffalo Bill, "Joe Straight" making his way through the psychedelic freak-out at the Pigeon Toed Orange Peel. "Say, what gives with you people out there," thunders the commissioner (Lee J. Cobb). "Too much sun?" Law and the Age of Aquarius are the broken systems, the ramrod outsider roams free (badge and white stetson come right off) and gets his man, a mordant position between Madigan and Dirty Harry. The Big Apple with a countercultural bite taken out of it, autumn reds and browns zapped by a gallery of urban kooks, vividly sketched and bounced off Eastwood's wry alienation. Betty Field conducts a bravura symphony of maternal kvetching, Tisha Sterling transforms her twitchy chiclet into a perverse update of the noir moll, Susan Clark makes do with the social worker whose feminism is no match for the macho wiles of the Westerner. Gothic architecture plus beaded curtains, the classical Siegel mise en scène versus modernist fissures (a zoom onto a bullet-cracked windshield, a distorting lens in the wake of a bushwacking), motorcycles inside The Cloisters and the timeless courtesy of returning a feller's hat. "You know, I'm always interested in new techniques." Midnight Cowboy the following year has the other side of the coin. With Tom Tully, Melodie Johnson, James Edwards, Rudy Diaz, David Doyle, Marjorie Bennett, and Seymour Cassel.
--- Fernando F. Croce |