The Missouri Breaks

This exuberant, wild and wooly western by Arthur Penn (Little Big Man; The Chase; Miracle Worker) was the first movie Marlon Brando made after the back-to-back triumphs of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, four years earlier. He plays a “regulator” hired to put a stop to marauding cattle thief Jack Nicholson, but there’s nothing regular about Brando in this film: in every scene he’s dressed differently and his Irish accent comes and goes; it’s clear that the movie’s freewheeling style owes much to his improvisations. But is the actor “out of control”, as New York Times critic Vincent Canby complained? Or is he channeling the unpredictable menace and danger of the character, a figure you might compare to Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men?

Clayton is, unmistakably, Brando at the end of his tether, not quite sure whether to take ruthless advantage of this film or to create the wildest character who ever rode under the cloak of the western. It is a perilous attempt – just as Sterne’s book hovers always between being hilarious and too far-fetched to be persisted with. He is a great, flabby sham, an actor close to suicide, maybe – and this is an extraordinary display of incipient madness or incorrigible playfulness. It is up to us to decide. No need to call it a masterpiece. Still, The Missouri Breaks is a rich, leisurely treat, with huge surprises. Now that all the talk of absurd percentages and misbehaviour on the set can be put aside, I think it’s easier to see a rare picture about what life, order and madness were like up in Montana in the 1880s.

David Thomson, The Guardian

Time has worked wonders on The Missouri Breaks. On first release, Arthur Penn’s 1976 western found itself derided as an addled, self-indulgent folly. Today, its quieter passages resonate more satisfyingly, while its lunatic take on a decadent, dying frontier seems oddly appropriate. Most significantly, the film provides a showcase for a mesmerising turn from Marlon Brando.

Xan Brooks, The Guardian

The Missouri Breaks is an elliptical film, modern in manner but highly realistic in its depiction of frontier life in the Montana of the 1880s. This is a rich, allusive movie, witty, tinged with tragedy, and beautifully lit in the style of paintings by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.

Philip French, The Observer

A wonderfully quirky Western, brilliantly scripted by Thomas McGuane, which strips all the cute whimsy away from the Butch Cassidy theme (outlaws on the run from a relentless lawman), replacing it with a kind of pixillated terror. It’s one of the few truly major Westerns of the ’70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.

Time Out