Continued from Page 4
tongue at Marvin. Palance
bangs Marvin's back and range
dust fills the room.
At the end of the film,
Marvin is hunting down his
friend Shorty with a gun. They
are in a slaughter house, and
Marvin cannot see him. Both
men's guns are drawn. Instead
of moving into the opening in
front of him, Marvin slides an
oil lamp as distraction on a
wire, referring back to the
tobacco can and their earlier
friendship. Shorty hesitates and
cannot shoot.
It is an incidental moment,
but a rich one, visually ex
pressed. There is an incredible respect
for life in the film, and so it is
easy to care about these people
as lie good times don't come.
Marvin is a cowboy when
cowboys aren't needed, when
the range is being fenced in,
receipts are being cashed, his
best friend married off and
later killed by Shorty the
bronco buster they both worked
with and liked.
Shorty couldn't tame one
grey horse. Marvin joked and
said he'd do it himself. Then
Shorty is laid off by order of
Taceless Eastern Consolidated,
shoots a deputy marshall by
mistake and starts rustling
cattle for money to live.
The grey is sold to a wild
west show and Shorty is in
flight. Marvin mounts the
horse. Palance is married and
Marvin needs a steady job to
marry Jean Moreau, to settle
into a different kind of life.
His riding down the grey
becomes an act of flexing
muscles going dead. It is an
exersion-assertion and as the
horse bucks and batters
Marvin, together they utterly
destroy three-quarters of a used
up cowboy town.
Marvin breaks the horse, but
the act Is of interest only to the
owner of the wild west show
a rodent nosed little man who
offers Marvin a steady job
performing if he'll take the
name of a silver and fringe
western hero run over by a
street car in St. Louis.
But Marvin can't do it. "I
ain't spittin' on my whole life."
Monte Walsh's struggle is to
find a way to live his changing
life true to the mechanism of
his body and his mind. He isn't
courting abstract notions of
honor or pride. He simply is a
cowboy.
I like horses, one man says,
with steely eyes like fighting
Joe's staring off across the
range land to the sky.
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23 1970
THE NEBRASKAN
PAGE 5
