Back in 1976, United Artists brought together great director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man) and two of the biggest stars of the seventies, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson.
They gave them a huge budget, a great writer Thomas McGaune (Tom Horn) and the hottest composer of the day, John Williams.
What they ended up with was THE MISSOURI BREAKS, one the slowest, strangest, biggest bombs in film history.
Nicholson stars as Tom Horn, the rugged leader of a gang of horse thieves. When Horn finds himself falling in love with the daughter of local rancher with plenty of horses, he lets the gang go on ahead and he begins to adopt the life of a farmer and date the rancher's daughter, Jane, whose played with a strangely modern sensibilities by Kathleen Lloyd.
The rancher is fed up with the gangs and hires regulator Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando) to track down the horse thieves one at a time until the entire bunch has been eliminated.
Brando has instilled some great tweaks and eccentric tics to his greatest roles, but this was officially his "off the rails" phase.
Brando adopts a bad Scot accent, some amazingly eclectic outfits and seems intent on never giving Nicholson any normal emotions to play off of in their scenes together.
At one important dramatic moment, Brando wears (for NO explained or logical reason) a frontier woman's dress and bonnet on horseback as he tracks and kills a key member of the gang.
The tag line for the movie was "One Steals. One Kills. One Dies."
The one that died got lucky that he didn't have to sit through this long, boring modernistic take on a western. Hey, some of the scenery is pretty.....
What a BOMB.
No breaks here, this bore fest gets an F.
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