Long identified as the quintessential American genre, the Western has never really disappeared, despite distinct periods of inactivity. During these moments, when the style was briefly out of fashion or absent from the scene, it’s always only been in hiding, its structures and rhythms concealing themselves in other guises. One significant case occurred in the mid-1970s, as the Euro revisionist wave crested back on American shores, when the appetite for rollicking outlaw epics played out amid wide open spaces was sublimated into a different type of movie. Following the general realist trend that accompanied the decline of the traditional studio system, stories which might have fallen under this umbrella got bumped up into the present day, the subtextual commentary on modern circumstances scrapped in favor of more overt explication of prevailing cultural moods.
One prominent thread within this shift is the ‘70s phenomenon of “Hicksploitation”, a sprawling grindhouse genre which contained two prominent strands, both of them deeply rooted in classic Western mechanics. The first of these, embodied by such films as Walking Tall and Billy Jack, finds the impulse toward violent retribution recoded into new figures of masculine iconoclasm, a cosmetic transformation that allows them to pose as anti-authority while serving as the mirror to reactionary, hippie-smashing fantasies like Dirty Harry and Joe. The other, coming out of the Roger Corman school of inventive, youth-oriented trash, is embodied by criminal picaresques (Boxcar Bertha, The Sugarland Express), themselves responses to earlier rebel road movies (Two Lane Blacktop, Easy Rider, Vanishing Point). Here cars and bikes replace steeds, and the stalking horses of authority are relentless pursuers that must be outrun for as long as possible, even if they can never be fully escaped. The eventual fusion of these two threads is found in late-decade hits like Convoy, in which a consistently shirtless Kris Kristofferson outruns a growing battalion of cops led by a furious Ernest Borgnine, and Smokey and the Bandit, where a peak-form Burt Reynolds turns smuggling Coors across state lines into the stuff of legend.
There are countless numbers of these types of movies, mostly contained within the neat parameters of a single decade. By the early ‘80s, such renegade impulses would be subsumed within the nascent Reagan Revolution, laying the groundwork for a cowboy presidency which capitalized on the two trends, glorifying both rugged individualism and a preening distrust for organized authority. This is clearly not the best outcome, but it’s a fitting one for two instances of seedy societal discomfort made tangible by cinematic chaff product.
All of the above qualities are embodied in Rancho Deluxe, which, true to the requirements of the Streaming Hell universe, is far from the greatest movie on its own merits. A contemporary neo-Western following two affable losers just trying to get by, it depicts a modern Montana where its penny-ante desperadoes are also behind on rent, no space left for them to truly run wild. The resulting film, in which Jack McKee (Jeff Bridges) and Cecil Colson (Sam Waterston) engage in an escalating series of cattle rustling schemes directed against neurotic ranch owner John Brown (Clifton James), is all vibes, but the overall feeling is the same as sinking into a warm bath, familiar actors doing familiar shtick in unfamiliar circumstances. As a buddy pairing, Waterston and Bridges are weirdly matched but charming ‒ the former hangdog but acerbic, the latter embodying his usual amiable rogue figure ‒ the duo bolstered by memorable supporting work from genre stalwarts Harry Dean Stanton, Slim Pickens and Richard Bright.
The movie’s mix of mournfulness and irony would be replicated the following year by novelist-turned screenwriter Thomas McGuane in The Missouri Breaks, an even weirder traditionally set Western that goes further in its formal deconstruction, to the point of approaching intentional parody. Both films are ground down by their own overwhelming sense of humorous melancholy, which provides memorable atmosphere but keeps the narrative stuck in a low gear. Both are also typical examples of another ‘70s fixation, the “foreclosed horizon” variant of the genre, forlorn latter-day elegies in which the drive toward new frontiers butts up against the fences that have enclosed the range, with nowhere new to take the rebellion. In Rancho Deluxe, the enemy is a ridiculous nouveau-riche entrepreneur who’s decided to spend his latter years playing ranch baron, but he nonetheless owns the land, a privilege that no one seems capable of taking away. The only thing Jack and Cecil can do is hope to score a few points off him before the hammer ultimately comes down.
In this context, their ongoing conversational fantasy of the titular dream ranch is about as solid as the yarn spun in Of Mice and Men. Like Lenny and George, the two men are also rootless and hapless, with Cecil (who’s routinely referred to as “The Indian”) representing the only genuine Native presence (both Montanan and American) in a movie full of Eastern transplants, fake cowboys and conniving church girls. This world of doubles and dupes is distinctly imagined by McGuane, himself an emigre, who’s founded his career on tweaking the mythic status of the West. Yet that tweaking, which prides itself on assuming a knowing cynicism about the essential falseness of the entire enterprise, also buys into the myth, at least enough to be disappointed by its hollowness.
It’s a common pose for the decade, when nostalgia commingled toxically with burnout pessimism, helping to cement the fame of a bevy of hard-drinking, deep-thinking transplanted Hemingway disciples, from Edward Abbey to McGuane’s fellow Michigander-turned-Montanan Jim Harrison. There’s also the now-legendary Jimmy Buffett, the poet laureate of substance-aided Boomer rebirth, who fittingly appears here in an extended country music performance in a cowboy bar, before his Parrothead persona had fully solidified. In fact, nothing here feels fully solid: plans are half-cocked, motivations are believably sketchy, and everyone is dwarfed by the landscape. This is a mixed quality, one that enhances the movie as much as it unmoors it, but director Frank Perry (another veteran demythologizer) and DP William A. Fraker do a great job of establishing the mindset of a gallery of lost souls, adrift amid a landscape of matchless beauty that isn’t doing anybody any good. Themes of gentrification and carpetbagging serve as reminders that nearly everyone in this country had to originally come from somewhere else, a quality particularly felt in what had so recently been the extreme borderlands, and now stands an out-of-the-way backwater still subject to the same national neuroses.
Key to this is Cecil, an icon of displacement whose characterization is only given a few token stabs at development, because the movie ultimately isn’t interested in advancing this ennui beyond a surface indicator. That the part is played by a white guy, a casting choice that would likely not fly nowadays, is complicated via repeated hints that his bloodline is nowhere near pure, a suspicion enforced by the appearance of The Godfather alum and guido sleaze icon Joe Spinell as his father. It’s fairly gross how this character, essentially another comic bozo in a good-natured romp a few shades away from a stoner comedy, is also held up as proof that everything’s a sham nowadays. Even the Indians aren’t real anymore, a fact they realize as much as everyone else. Yet the discomfort this creates is instructive, typifying the darkness inherent to a fun, easygoing movie that also bears dark traces of a country’s developing psychic underbelly, one that was only a few years from flopping over into the mainstream.
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