Hippie Western
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Kid Blue opens, pre-credits, in the middle of a train robbery. So far, so conventional but only for a few seconds. The robbers, we quickly realise, are incompetent, one falling off the train which speeds by, unscathed and unrobbed. Dennis Hopper, playing the Kid Blue of the title, announces to the gang over campfire that night that he’s turning his back on the outlaw life and is off to turn over a new leaf in a new town. Cut to the titles sequence which, with its slow camera panning and attractively muted colours, all set to a wistful country-folk ballad, tell us we’re watching a film that could only have been made when it was, in the early 1970s. What follows falls, like most Westerns of the day (discounting those starring John Wayne) under the heading of ‘revisionist’, and yet it’s a little different than many of these offerings. And you might have a good time with it – provided you’re able to get down with a cowboy movie whose sympathies lie more with the counterculture than with Duke’s conservative worldview. It’s a hippie Western, basically, as advertised by Hopper’s shoulder-length hair.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Kid Blue, real name Bickford Waner, duly rides from the wilderness, which we learn is in the Fort Worth area and where he’s plied his trade as a small-time crook, into Dime Box, an expanding town down south near Mexico (Texas does have a real-life town of Dime Box, but it is tiny and in mid-state so presumably only lent its name to the film). We next see him, looking distinctly goofy in the dungarees which will remain his outfit for much of the movie, sweeping a barbershop floor and emptying its spittoon (the barber is played by cult favourite character actor JT Walsh). It’s the first of a succession of menial jobs that Kid / Bickford will take up and lose as the film progresses. He variously tries his hand at neck-wringing and wing-plucking in a squalid chicken yard, coal-shovelling, and (the furthest he ever climbs) manning the conveyer belt of a factory turning out novelty ceramic trinkets: the heart of the town’s growing turn-of-century boom and bustle.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It’s outside the barbershop that Bickford first comes across the local sheriff, ‘Mean John’ Simpson, played by a JAW favourite, the ever-excellent Ben Johnson. Mean John immediately spits into Bickford’s just-emptied spittoon. True to his nickname, he has a no-frills approach to policing Dime Box – and he’s immediately suspicious of the town’s longhaired new arrival (who of course doesn’t reveal his Kid name and past to anyone in town), and determined not to give him an easy time.
In true early ‘70s style, this is a movie driven less by plot than by a series of relationships, in this case between Hopper and various other people in and around Dime Box. As well as Mean John, there’s the sundry fellow-residents of his boarding house and, soon to become his closest acquaintances, Reese and Molly Ford, played by Warren Oates and Lee Purcell respectively. Reese, one of the factory workers, is drawn to Bickford: in one of the film’s most unusual scenes, they enjoy a bath together (Reese is an enthusiast for the Ancient Greeks and has just invested his factory pay in a bathtub).
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This is a refreshingly different Warren Oates than the wild man we know and love, though just as well-acted: he’s an overly trusting, sad-eyed dreamer, something of an amateur philosopher and historian and, frankly, a bit of a loser. At first unnoticed by him, the flirtatious Molly eventually makes a move on Bickford, who tries to resist; when Reese finds out, the revelation ends their friendship and, apparently, Reese’s sanity.
Then there’s a trio of Indians who befriend Bickford and their other white friend, an eccentric, not to say slightly crazy, preacher and recovering alcoholic played by Peter Boyle, who, besides giving charismatic brimstone sermons and regularly making philosophical remarks, is designing and constructing his very own wooden biplane on the outskirts of town… an invention that will play a crucial role in the final sequences of the film.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
And finally, there’s Kid’s erstwhile girlfriend from Fort Worth who arrives in Dime Box in the last third of the film, blowing his cover but in some ways just hastening the inevitability of his reluctant return to crime. For the reality is that everything’s been stacked against the Kid from the start: the powers-that-be in the town, his own erratic temper, and a bunch of plain bad luck. You don’t need to be an academic to spot the film’s various bits of social commentary.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Its targets include the usual small-town hypocrisy, the exploitative employment practices of mass-production capitalism, and the junkiness of the products on which it entices the public to waste their growing disposable incomes.
Oh, and there’s also the mixed blessings of religion, society’s and in particular law enforcement’s distrust of wayward youth, and, of course, the prejudice faced by Native Americans. But thankfully none of these themes are put across with too heavy a hand. The overall tone is light-hearted if a little melancholy round the edges. The film’s a bit like Kid Blue himself, in fact: prone to snatches of violence but basically good-natured. British cinematographer Billy Williams imbues the images with appealing lighting, while the soundtrack is liberally sprinkled with harmonica, banjo and piano, and both fiddle and violin, switching between lyrical and jaunty modes.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
There isn’t a great deal of readily available information on the production background. Though distributed by 20th Century Fox, Kid Blue was made by an independent production company, Marvin Schwartz Productions. Schwartz has his name on just a handful of movies, but they include two previous Westerns: Wayne caper The War Wagon (1967) and noisy Burt Reynolds adventure 100 Rifles (1969) are both entertaining lightweight pictures. Schwartz seems to rather disappear from cinema history as soon as Kid Blue wrapped, with no further credits on either Wikipedia or IMDB from then until his death 24 years later. (A postscript that may or may not be coincidental: in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the lead character’s agent, played by Al Pacino, is named Marvin Schwarz, without the ‘t’…)
Scriptwriter Edwin (also known as Bud) Shrake had his name on two other screenplays for Westerns, both similarly low-key and likeable: the Cliff Robertson rodeo drama JW Coop (1972), and Steve McQueen’s final oater Tom Horn (1980). As for director James Frawley, he was a former actor who mostly directed TV shows – numerous episodes of The Monkees leading to decades’ more primetime shows extending from Columbo to Cagney & Lacey and Grey’s Anatomy. His most successful film was the Muppets’ first cinematic venture, The Muppet Movie (1979). In short, he seems to have been a versatile hired hand with particular experience in amiably offbeat comedy: Kid Blue fits snugly and Frawley does a solid job with it.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It’s really Hopper’s film, though. As we know, he could do very intense performances but he decides to play the Kid in a very different key as an uneducated, wayward, and occasionally volatile but basically well-meaning innocent abroad who, we take it, became (and becomes again) a small-time bad guy as a result of circumstance more than innately bad character. Hopper’s fellow players vary from excellent (Johnson and Oates) to good (Ralph Waite of The Waltons fame as an antagonistic fellow resident) to merely OK (Purcell) to a bit off-kilter (Boyle’s preacher performance is, to this viewer’s mind, a little overripe…).
All in all, I liked Kid Blue – didn’t love it. I found it a bit too self-consciously quirky for its own good, and I especially wasn’t massively keen on the fanciful final reel and the ending. And as you sort of come to expect of the early 1970s, the pacing is too languid at times. Still, it’s a Western to be welcomed, not just because any Western at all was a sight for sore eyes in 1973 but because it’s also a nice change of pace from the alternatives at the time. On the one hand, it’s a world away from Wayne’s increasingly lazy and out-of-touch oaters aimed at older viewers (to be clear, I thoroughly enjoy a lot of those films all the same, and I’m more likely to re-watch several of them than I am this). On the other, although it has the fashionable anti-Establishment instincts of the time, it indulges them without approaching either the savage cynicism of the Spaghettis or the relentlessly grimy bleakness of most of the American revisionist pics then doing the rounds. It’s actually rather sweet. We’re not talking your-life-is-worthless-without-it, e-pards, but Kid Blue is worth a look.