Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

museumofdave My initial take on this film, given the period it was made, was to wonder who was taking what drugs and how often; Nicholson had recently finished the brilliant Chinatown, Brando had Last Tango In Paris under his belt, and director Penn, the epic Little Big Man; they all got together for this--and it's a haphazard mess; each time the plot starts to evolve in some meaningful way, it comes to a halt for Brando's extravagant lisping Irishman, a self-indulgent performance that poor Arthur Penn had to deal with, or for the romance Nicholson kindles with the magnetic Kathleen Lloyd--and whatever happened to her? I was anxious to finally see the film excoriated by most critics after all these years, and didn't exactly hate it, and did find that Nicholson gives one of his least mannered performances, subdued and believable, perhaps in reaction to the Brando silliness--but given the talent, several folks seemed to have their heads elsewhere. It is indeed an alternate Western, but unlike the moving Monte Walsh or Open Range, or McCabe And Mrs. Miller, it's largely attitudinal in nature, which may be enough for some.

acebros-1 You know how things seem So Cool when you're stoned, and then you find them later and shake your head? I think that's what happened to this movie, or, rather, to the people who made this movie: a giant giddy collective lapse of judgment. Many many fine elements, exceptional, sometimes brilliant, but, ungrounded, and wildly self-indulgent. So, doesn't quite work, though you certainly come away (and it's been 20 years since I've seen it) with some indelible images.Not the only film of the Seventies with this problem, by any means - one that comes to mind is Le Voyou (The Crook) with Trintignant by C Lelouch from 1970 -- it's easy to imagine them watching the rushes through a cloud of smoke and saying "Wow...." Another case of Homer on the nod.

Robert J. Maxwell A sometimes amusing tale of four or five small-time horse thieves in Montana. The movement of horses across the wide high plains is getting a bit dicey so the inexperienced gang holds up a train in a comic scene in order to buy a small farm in which they plan to stash their stolen herds until market time. Something like that.Jack Nicholson is one of the gang. As the gang repairs the farm just to make it look functional, Nicholson finds that he rather LIKES planting all those cabbages and pruning the apple trees in the orchard. He's beginning to put down as many roots as his carrots. The rest of the clumsy gang carry on their nefarious trade.Meanwhile, an important local rancher named Braxton sees his horses stolen and, soon enough, his nymphomaniacal daughter begins taking up with Nicholson. This irritates Braxton, and he hires Marlon Brando as a "regulator", that is, a private law enforcement gun for hire whose specialty is exploding people's heads at a distance with a high-powered rifle. Brando disposes of the gang one by one, even after Braxton fires him, and there is a final confrontation between him and Nicholson.The best thing about the movie -- or the worst thing, depending on your taste -- is Marlon Brando's performance. It exceeds the unpredictable and reaches for the bizarre. He wears outlandish costumes, switches from one phony accent to another without adumbration.Sometimes I had the feeling that the director, Arthur Penn, simply let the camera roll while Brando improvised lines and bits of business. One of the most singular scenes has Brando alone with two horses in the wilderness. He converses with the two horses. He allows one to nibble its way up the carrot that he, Brando, holds in his mouth. "You have the eyes of Cleopatra," he murmurs lovingly. He holds a carrot out to the other animal and then slaps its cheek when it tries to bite the carrot. "That's faw yaw deceit and treachery," he scolds, using a high-flown English accent adopted from the Fletcher Christian character from "Mutiny on the Bounty." I don't know whether Brando was enjoying himself or not but I was laughing like hell. He trumpets his own idiosyncrasy earlier, a legend in his own bathtime. These entire scenes, like a few others, are utterly absurd.Nicholson is likable but it's not one of his more memorable performances. He seems to be one of those actors -- Paul Newman is another -- who is at his best when he gets the right role but otherwise slips into a default delivery. The girl with whom Nicholson winds up is attractive enough but sounds as if she'd just graduated from Smith College. The supporting cast is made up mostly of stalwarts who put in a professional effort.On the whole, you know what it looks like in its structure? "Bonny and Clyde", except that the despised forces of law and order are not dispersed among small-town coppers but are instead concentrated in the persona of Brando, the villainous murderer, and the embittered rancher who has hired him.

Spikeopath Starring two titans of cinema in Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, The Missouri Breaks sees Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde) direct, the screenplay provided by Thomas McGuane (Tom Horn) and John Williams composes the score. In the supporting cast are Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid, Kathleen Lloyd, Frederic Forrest and John McLiam. With all these people in place the film was one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Anticipation that was not met at the time as the film became a critical and commercial failure. However, time has been kind to the piece and now it shows itself to be far better than the iffy reputation that's afforded it.The story is a sort of working of the Johnson County War that surfaced in the early 1890s in Wyoming, where newer ranchers tried to settle but were set upon by the more established cattle barons of the land. One of the tactics by the wealthier ranch owners was to hire gunmen to terrorise anyone they saw as a threat. Here in Penn's movie we see David Braxton (McLiam) ruthlessly deal with anyone who he sees as a threat to his property. However, when someone enacts revenge on him by hanging his foreman, Braxton hires himself a "Regulator" named Robert E. Lee Clayton (Brando) to seek and destroy as it were. This spells bad news for the rustling gang led by Tom Logan (Nicholson), especially since Logan has started to form a relationship with Braxton's daughter, Jane (Lloyd). Somethings gotta give and blood is sure to be spilt.The most popular word used in reviews for the film is eccentric, mostly in reference to Brando's performance. The big man was growing ever more erratic off the screen and sure enough he changed the make up of his character and improvised at his leisure. Yet it does work in the context of the movie. With his dandy nastiness playing off of an excellent Nicholson turn, McGuane's richly detailed screenplay gets added bite, particularly during the more solemn parts of the story; where patience would be tried were it not for the brogue Irish Clayton. With Penn at the helm it's no surprise to find the piece is an amalgamation of moods. Poignancy hangs heavy for the most part as we deal in the ending of an era and the need to move on. But Penn also delivers much frontier action and snatches of cheery comedy. Then there is the violence, which doubles in shock value on account of the leisurely pace that Penn has favoured. It's sad to think that one of the best splicers of moods was so upset at the reaction to his film he quit cinema for the next five years.The film, well more realistically the reaction to it, possibly sounded the death knell for the Western genre until Eastwood & Costner refused to let it die. The 70s was an intriguing decade for the Oater, with many of them veering between traditional and revisionist. But of the many that were produced, the ones that dealt with the passing of the era, where the protagonists are soon to be relics of a tamed wilderness, have an elegiac quality about them. Penn's movie is fit to sit alongside the likes of Monte Walsh, The Shootist and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Yes it's quirky and is slowly driven forward, but it has many qualities for the genre fan to gorge on. 7.5/10