Bad Company

During the Civil War, Drew Dixon is sent west by his family to avoid conscription. On the road he joins a group of boy thieves led by Jake Rumsey. All of them are young, all are on the run, and none of them knows how to steal. The further west they go, the fewer of them there are. The subject is not adventure but hunger. All of the group's plans concern finding food, and what they steal is comically small; the heroism of the western template is entirely absent. The form is cold and muddy: winter, empty fields, grey sky. The cinematographer is Gordon Willis and the dark interiors recall his other work of those years. It is Robert Benton's first film as a director; he wrote it with David Newman, the pair having previously written Bonnie and Clyde. The production belongs to the wave of early seventies films dismantling the western from inside: the heroes are children, the morality is unclear and the ending is not a victory. Jeff Bridges plays Jake and Barry Brown plays Drew. Who it is for: viewers who like the revisionist western and seventies American cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting pace; the film is deliberately uneventful and makes no effort to make its characters likeable.