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Westerns circa 1970 were mostly about the end of the West, and
Monte Walsh is smack-dab in the middle of that melancholy moment. Lee Marvin and Jack Palance play middle-aged cowboys whose wandering ways are getting hemmed in by corporations, fences, and their own aging muscles. Not only is the boss man (grizzled veteran Jim Davis) laying off his longtime ranch hands, he doesn't even own the ranch himself anymore. The movie that emerges from this weary milieu is a curious, meandering artifact: the shapeless early going consists of fairly broad slapstick scenes of cowhand tomfoolery, and comes around--almost reluctantly, you sense--to a conventional frontier-justice story in its final half-hour. The movie's got Marvin's unimpeachable presence, a nice understated turn from Palance, and the welcome novelty of Jeanne Moreau playing Marvin's prostitute galfriend.
Monte Walsh is one of the few films directed by the esteemed cinematographer William A. Fraker, and it might serve as a model for why more cinematographers aren't directors: it looks great, but the internal rhythm feels off, the tone is variable, and scenes tend to play more like set pieces than essential parts of a whole. Granted, many of those set pieces are pretty tasty: Marvin and Moreau have a couple of touching scenes together, and there's a strikingly strange sequence with Marvin trying to break a particularly feisty horse in the streets of a town at night. Some of the film's best moments (such as Marvin's dismissal of an offer to ride in a Wild West show) are very much of their era in moviemaking, as is the theme song sung by Mama Cass Elliot. Throw in a score by the great John Barry, and the film's cult reputation is easily grasped--but its relative obscurity isn't hard to understand, either.
--Robert Horton
