Bad Company (1972) – DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jeff Bridges, Barry Brown, Jim Davis, David Huddleston
screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Robert Benton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover How the mighty do fall. By the end of the '70s, Robert Benton had lowered himself to Oscar-whoring with the tepid Kramer vs. Kramer–a fact impossible to reconcile with the promise he showed in Bad Company, his smashing directorial debut. Utterly distinct amongst revisionist westerns, Benton's marvel ditches the genre's boilerplate cynicism and revels in the freedom of lawlessness; instead of a clumsy knee-jerk finger-pointer, we get the joys and sorrows of life amongst scavengers. Having more in common with My Own Private Idaho or Going Places than with the pseudo-critical genre on whose margins it skulks, Bad Company lets us roam the landscape instead of following the road to town, and in so doing makes us feel things that no mere western could possibly make us feel.

In outline, Bad Company is par for the revisionist course: it has a few things in common with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, which made the reputations of the film's screenwriters. (Benton and collaborator David Newman.) Both films have rebel-children leads–chiefly, young Drew Dixon (Barry Brown), whose well-off family wants him to avoid the Civil War draft. Sending him off with a bankroll and a prayer, they unwittingly deliver him into the hands of Jake Rumsey (Jeff Bridges), a thief and drifter flanked by a gang of criminally inclined boys. Sensing that this might be the ideal way to elude the authorities, Drew makes advances towards Jake, and after he allegedly robs a general store, the gang agrees to let Drew join them. The rest of the film is devoted, like the earlier film, to their wanderings and derring-do. But with the echoes of "the times" in the reference to draft-dodging, and the spirit of '67 in its authoritarian nose-thumbings, could this simply be another vaguely political swipe at the ill-defined Man?

No such luck. Benton outshines Penn in nearly every particular, far surpassing the older director's awkward visuals and smug condescension. Benton is better as a visual stylist; while it's hard to go wrong with DP Gordon Willis, he puts the man to unusual uses and composes pictures of antiqued weirdness. This is not one of those movies that substitute a nylon-covered lens for period ambiance–the film offers the straight-up-and-down face of the 1860s rotted and fermented, its vertical lines strangely fragile and its colours muddy and wet. And Benton's approach to the actors and their roles is similarly superior to Penn's. Where the older director looked benevolently down on his characters, turning them into adorable bumpkins, Benton has respect for his characters, seeing the attraction of their way of life.

Perhaps it's all a matter of timing. Bonnie and Clyde was a product of the late-Sixties euphoria that allowed any schmoe with good intentions to say his dubious peace; it must have seemed a good idea at the time. Bad Company comes from the hangover after that party, when good intentions counted for little and nobody wanted to walk a moralistic line. It's here that Benton's film is most interesting: in detailing the miseducation of Drew Dixon, as he vacillates between good breeding and, uh, bad company, Benton shows the slide into amorality that was sweeping the nation. He's in with rebels without a cause, and has to choose between holding his values in vulnerability and chucking them so that he might survive. The beauty of the film is that he redefines both ends of the scale, ultimately asking if it's the honourable criminal Rumsey or the guardedly virtuous Dixon who is the worst company of all. So as a deception is finally revealed in the film's last act, finally levelling the two, it asks us to wonder if the fringe isn't the place to be after all.

I mourn the impossibility of more films like Bad Company, as I mourn the corruption of Robert Benton. As he went on to make "important" dreck like Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart, he demonstrated his debut's best irony. Those who dress in the clothes of virtue are not necessarily doing good, and those who set themselves against them are not necessarily doing evil. As a unique cross-section of a time and a place, Bad Company is priceless; it's just a shame to have to know that its director ultimately found his price.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Released in conjunction with the theatrical release of Buena Vista's unrelated film of the same name, Paramount's DVD issue of the 1972 Bad Company features an outstanding 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer of well-preserved source elements; if not for Jeff Bridges's youth, one could easily mistake extended portions of the film for something current. Black levels run deep, a fact as much attributable to the telecine operators as to Gordon "The Prince of Darkness" Willis–the picture is also awash in his typical Easter colours, a palette to which the DVD adheres. The disc also preserves the film's original mono mix, reproducing it with gentle clarity over two channels. (Harvey Schmidt's score sounds especially warm.) There are unfortunately no extras of any kind, not even a trailer.

92 minutes; PG; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Paramount