Nevada Smith

Max Sand's father is white and his mother is Kiowa. Three men come to the ranch and kill them both. Max does the only thing left: he goes after them. But he is sixteen, does not know how to use a gun and cannot read. On the road a gun dealer teaches him to shoot. He finds the three one by one across a search that takes years, and reaching each of them means entering another life, once even going to prison. Henry Hathaway directs. Steve McQueen plays Max Sand, and the men he hunts are Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy and Martin Landau. The character comes from Harold Robbins's novel The Carpetbaggers. In the 1964 adaptation Nevada Smith was an older supporting figure; this film was made as a prequel about his youth. Steve McQueen was thirty five during the shoot and plays a boy of sixteen, which is the most common criticism made of the film. What interests the narrative is not the revenge but what a man becomes while completing it. Max grows colder at every step and the ending is not a scene of victory. The production has the scale of the classic western in its wide outdoor work, but the tone is close to the hardening westerns of the period. Who it is for: viewers who like sixties American westerns and McQueen. Who it is not for: it is long, the sections repeat one another, and the question of age keeps straining its credibility.