Mr. Arthur Penn has directed some of the best films ever made - his instinct of a great story is unmistaken. His love for the best literature is again proved here. Thomas McGuane wrote a wild west Hamlet version that maintains the original theme plus lots of humor. But the original story is cruel and so this post 60s western should be eventually.

Rancher David Braxton has a horse rustling problem and he deals with it ruthlessly. His daughter Jane (Kathleen Lloyd) struggles with his father's cruelty. Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson) leads a band of horse thieves and one of his men just got hung by Braxton. The gang decides to rob a train since they're getting hung anyways but it's a comedic adventure when Logan almost falls off a bridge. Logan decides to take revenge on Braxton by flirting with his innocent daughter Jane, buying a small neighboring property, and stealing his stock. Logan's men kill the Braxton foreman and Braxton hires regulator Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando) to hunt down the thieves. Clayton is an odd man who quickly zeroes in on Logan. Meanwhile Logan's men goes to Canada to steal horses from the RCMP.It's a comedic revisionist western taking apart some of the iconic western characters. The comedic part is light and unfunny. This is a worthwhile watch simply for Marlon Brando's crazy performance. It is much derided at the time and I can see why. His problematic actor style is legendary now. His wildly unique character overshadows everyone else including a popular Jack Nicholson right after 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'. This movie must have built up unbearable hype and the disappointment is easy to imagine. The movie doesn't really hold together as a whole. The jokes aren't funny. Brando is all by himself. Nicholson tries his best but nobody can be expected to pull this off. At least he and Kathleen Lloyd have some fun flirty scenes together.

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

Fun-loving criminal Jack Nicholson attempts to keep a low-profile by buying a ranch in order to launder stolen livestock. However, he begins to reconsider his thieving ways when he begins to romance the daughter of a local rancher. Soon he finds himself and his gang targeted by Marlon Brando, a very eccentric and very lethal hired gun.Though not as bad as some prominent critics would have you believe, nor as brilliant as others insist, this once in a lifetime pairing of Nicholson and Brando is a little bit disappointing.They're both pretty amusing (especially Brando), but don't really have much to do, at least until the final fifty-minutes or so when Brando gets busy. These two simply should have thrown off more sparks than they did!Still, this tongue-in-cheek, offbeat western has it's moments, just not as many as director Arthur Penn's Little Big Man.There's some good support from Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton, Frederick Forrest, and John P. Ryan, as Nicholson's gang.