Lonesome Cowboy, Wandering Son

JUNIOR BONNER begins with a black-and-white fog-grained portrait of the title rodeo star, played acutely by a mellowed Steve McQueen, lowering himself onto a snorting Brahma bull called Sunshine. The rodeo announcer tells us some basic facts: Jr. was a two-year bull-riding champion, now nearing 40, a bit past his prime, Sunshine has never been ridden for the full 8 seconds time. The gate to the pen is thrown open, clowns dressed in baggy checked pants and vests and red fright wigs lure the bull out and get him jumping. Bonner holds on to the rope knot as if his gloves were glued to it, but his ass is thrown off the bull's hump as soon as his jaunt begins. It's going to be a rough few moments.

And we cut again and again to them, split-screen images tuned to the ruffling of the rodeo man's brow, as battered Junior makes his way back to his trailer. Every bit of stable dirt crusting on his boots, every slap of leather chaps against dungarees, even the feel of sweated denim against the man's chest, reminds him of his failure. The champ, good-natured, broadfacedly smiling, watches Bonner tape his bruised midsection. ("Whooiee!" says Twilliger). He also backs up Bonner's white Cadillac to his horse trailer. "Maybe I'd better take up another line of work," says Bonner.

Then Jerry Fielding's rueful music grows percussively insistent, and breaks into a Rod Hart song about how an Arizona morning could make a Prescott roamer almost want to settle down. The landscape is hard and scrubby, but its color is warm. This is home. Bonner stops at a gas station-fruit market, buys fuel, and apples, and feeds one to his horse. Another frontier Cadillac passes him when he's back on the open road, driven by two rodeo friends with two pretty young ladies. "How you feeling, cowboy?" calls one. "Lonely, right now." "Have a taste of our Sunshine," the girl answers, as she flips a can of beer over to him.

The last shot we have of Junior's trip in this opening-credits sequence shows him waking up some ways from the road, by a rocky crag and a river where his horse can catch its thirst; the rider touches his wound, but moves right on, right to the outskirts of Prescott, to his father's land.

Junior is, by any outside standards, a loser. When he returns to Prescott, it's to a family broken by his cowboy father's rodeo roistering and his younger brother's commercialism: Curly Bonner turns the homestead ranch into a site for electrically-equipped mobile homes (Ace Bonner has agreed to it after losing all his cash in hair-brained prospecting schemes), and the mother is going to be installed in the development curio shop. Junior himself is swiftly losing the respect he once held in other men's eyes. He asks stock contractor Buck Roan (played fullheartedly by Ben Johnson) if he could ride the Brahma bull once more for his hometown people, even offering half his purse money for it. Roan (before he finally accepts) shakes his head: "You've just got to admit to yourself you ain't the rider you were a few years ago...neither me nor my cattle aim to make a living off another man's pride."

But director Sam Peckinpah and writer Jeb Rosebrook want us to learn more about Junior Bonner and through him. Bonner is the not inglorious hero of his film, both his attitude towards the world and his personal morality make him so. Bonner knows that most of Prescott is for shit, pure and simple; that most of the people never appreciated that Arizona morning, and hustle like carney hucksters to package the West which gives them their identity and heritage and sell it for a price--if it makes surviving easier. Junior can't settle for that mediocrity, can't stand it: he much prefers his old man. Ace, with dirt-sense and not without some self-knowledge, simply can't see much point to the ways you have to make a living when the ranges are fenced and the mines drained. But Junior knows his limits as well. Ace couldn't raise the family, couldn't do right by his wife--who has more understanding than any of them, and a rare rapport with Junior. And, more painful than anything else, Junior knows his own limits. He is a rodeo man and that's it, better than his father only in his disillusionment, not yet in any practice. But he's made his choices, has found them suitable and sticks with them, not therefore fancying himself a hero, but gaining the old Socratic sense of irony behind that laconic exterior.

BONNER REPEATS a line used by Peckinpah in 1970 to seal the fate of the love-making preacher in the comedy-romance. The Ballad of Cable Hogue: when a svelte rodeo groupie asks him why he's so reticent about making an emotional commitment, he says, "I'm just passing through." His life-fulfillment is limited to the peak experiences of the rodeo. He's just drifting, and if he sounds heroic and his acts seem attractive, that's our problem as well.

Peckinpah is not making any easy comment about frontiers closing in and man losing his roots in nature and primal passions. He's pushed those themes to their furthest extremes before. Peckinpah here, for the first time, is able to treat all his characters without romanticization, with respectful distance, not close-up passion. He has come to a more nature viewpoint. What he decries is a country that can't prepare its men for the world they grow up in, stunting in youth the lives of those men and the face of the land they desecrate and the structures they build. He shows us what those who accept such a society deserve: all the kisses that their self-justified, pretty little wives can give them, a plot of ground they can rest their tired hams on and raise the children that will be as undeniably stupid as themselves. And Peckinpah also shows what happens to those who sense that something is wrong, but can't yet formulate an alternative: they become like Ace and his son Junior.

The mother, at least, breaks out on her own in a levelheaded fashion, planting vegetables for herself and keeping boarders until Curly buys her townhouse too. But it's more realistic, more consistent within the film, and more hopeful for Peckinpah's future that the director does not allow the traditional American "back to the garden" virtues which he celebrated in Cable Hogue to be successful. The modern world is not the Old West (which in itself was not precisely the Lockean state of nature that Peckinpah has sometimes made it out to be). There's got to be a new ideal, which Peckinpah has not yet found.

But he's looking for it. One of the most heartening things about Junior Bonner is the growth it shows in its director. Peckinpah looks honestly at the world with a view he could only extend into grotesquerie in Straw Dogs. He knows this Arizona territory, and thus is in such a position of strength that he can love the fools without killing them. Working from that base, if he can now move toward American subjects set in more pertinent modern points farther east and west, he might become one of the first American filmmakers to inform or enrage his audiences to the extent that they might change their world.

AND THERE is something tonic in the way the man's career has progressed aesthetically. Blessed from the start with an intense eye and a feel for the sensuous camera move, he has become increasingly skillful in cueing his audience by these means to the psychology of his characters. He has become so subtle in his effects that his two major blunders in Junior Bonner--a slow-motion destruction of a cottage by a tractor which is the softest piece of visual agrarian propaganda since The Grapes of Wrath, and a scene in an empty railroad station heightened by the handy entrance of a train--stick out like Irish bulls in a full corral. There is interplay between Ace (Robert Preston) and Mrs. Bonner which says more about responsibility in male-female relationships (and with the slightest means) than I would ever have thought Peckinpah capable of. "All you are is dreams and sweet talk," says the woman. "And I sweetened the dreams as well, if you remember," says Ace. Ida Lupino, magnificent as the wife, hardens her look though there are tears in her eyes, and slaps his face. "I sure as hell deserved that." "You surely did," she says.

There are flaws in the film, as there are in every Peckinpah production, but they are mostly due to Jeb Rosebrook's dialogue. Ace's language is sometimes that of a 19th century vaudevillian, and if God only knows what rodeo groupies talk like, it must be something different than what is said here. But there is enough full achieved in this film--with the aid of photographer Lucien Ballard, composer Jerry Fielding, and the setting and people of Prescott (where the first pro rodeo was held in 1888)-to reaffirm my faith in Sam Peckinpah as the first American director to successfully put his own world on film in his own vocabulary, and keep on growing consistently beyond it.