Bronco Billy (1980)

How sad is this?

Best movie ever!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Clint Eastwood labels Bronco Billy as one of his favorite films so who am I to tell him different. It is a fun and quirky movie, kind of like You Can't Take It With You. He certainly has gathered together a collection of people similar to Grandpa Vanderhoff's friends and family.Playing the title role Eastwood is the owner and star of a wild west show Eastwood has in his employ a collection of characters who are uniquely loyal to him. To which he adds Sondra Locke who is one of those rich heiresses which saturated films in the Thirties.Bronco Billy's outfit is hardly like Buffalo Bill Cody's show nor even like the one John Wayne was the impresario of in Circus World. It's just scraping by, it's people not being paid for weeks on end. But none of them will leave him.Locke's been left flat by her husband and she's hired by Eastwood not knowing who she is as essentially a come-on. She's attractive enough to be one. Locke learns soon enough that the people in the show are there to escape their own reality and step into the mythology of the wild west. Eastwood himself has created Bronco Billy, his own real life was nothing to brag about. He feels to some degree that people can be what they want and he gives those who are with him a chance to do just that.Clint Eastwood in his westerns certainly created enough mythology of the old west steps back a bit from those characters in Bronco Billy. It's a curiously old fashioned film though, the kind I wish were still made.What I wouldn't give to work in Bronco Billy's show.

This movie is the most charming, full of self-irony, cheerfulness and mystic depth a fairy tale that Clint Eastwood has ever made. Things do not just happen here. They happen just right the way he ever wished them to happen.The film could be taken as if it were of an entertaining genre at the first glance. However, it has a multitude of layers, which may keep you analyzing for about as much as you may wish to. It contains a deal of self-reflection, for Bronco Billy is the director's best self. It is much about finding and understanding oneself, for that is the journey Sandra Lockes character is taking. It is much about the western movie as a whole, and its loosing contact with the modern time. One can't but see parallels to Fellini's 'La Strada', maybe to Bergman's 'Sawdust and tinsel' and perhaps many more. And it is filled with plenty of small details, charged with good humour. And of course, as a fairy tale it is full of idealistic messages.Is is not a regular masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece. It is a meta-, reflective, essentially post-modernistic, masterpiece. Most probably will suit the taste of those looking for art and substance.

Bronco Billy (1980) ** 1/2 (out of 4) The cowboy/dreamer Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) is barely keeping his Wild West show going but his luck's about to change when he gets involved with a woman (Sondra Locke) recently dumped by her husband. This is a rather interesting film as I've read that Eastwood says it's his favorite but at the same time I've read what a bomb it was at the box office when originally released. It's certainly understandable why most people would avoid this thing but that's a shame as it's a cute little film that manages to have enough charm but I doubt those wanting Dirty Harry will have much use for it. I wouldn't say I enjoyed the film all the way through as I did think there were some flaws including the ultra-long running time. A dreamy comedy like this one really didn't need to go on for nearly two-hours but some of that is due to the screenplay, which is quite predictable in regards to the ending. With that said one still has to admire Eastwood for trying a film like this because it's basically just about making your dreams come true. In the case of Eastwood's character, he always wanted to be a cowboy and he's doing whatever it takes to keep his show going even though modern audiences have grown tired of it. Eastwood gives a very good performance and once that will keep a smile on the viewers face. The actors hasn't had too many chances to play a nice and charming person but he handles the role very well. Locke is also quite good in her performance as the rich brat who eventually buys into the show of dreams. I found her performances to be quite good and she was very believable in the turns her character takes. Scatman Crothers. Geoffrey Lewis, Bill McKinney, Sam Bottoms and Sierra Pecheur all add nice support as well. I think a little editing would have helped the picture but then again I'm sure this is the type of film that would getting better on repeat viewings. I'm sure even today this isn't a title that Eastwood fans rush out to view but they should certainly give it a shot if for no other reason that to see the legend in a different light.

Bronco Billy McCoy is the poor man's Buffalo Bill Cody, the proprietor and star of a touring Wild West show, essentially a circus with a Western theme. Billy might dress like a cowboy, but in reality he is not even a Westerner; he was originally a New Jersey shoe salesman who has spent time in jail for the attempted murder of his unfaithful first wife. Two other stars of the show have criminal records- one for practising medicine without a licence, one for embezzlement- and a third has been on the run ever since deserting the Army during the Vietnam War.Billy has big ideas for his show, but the whole thing has a very amateurish air. One of his female assistants quits after he accidentally hits her in the leg during his knife-throwing act, another after she falls off his horse. He accidentally finds himself entangled with Antoinette, an heiress who has eloped but who has been abandoned by her husband. Antoinette's elopement was dictated not by love but by the terms of her late father's will, which provided that she will only inherit his money if she marries before the age of thirty. Her husband, John, is a fortune-hunting gigolo; his main attraction for Antoinette is that she needs a husband who is as mercenary as she is. Antoinette is reluctantly persuaded to become Billy's new assistant, but the two initially loathe one another. Of course, this being a romantic comedy, that means that they will eventually end up falling for one another.Antoinette is played by Sondra Locke, who was Eastwood's lover at the time. She starts off as cold, snobbish, sarcastic and foul-tempered before gradually mellowing; I wonder if her name was borrowed from the French queen who is popularly, although inaccurately, believed to have advised her starving subjects to eat cake. There is a similar development in another film from this period, "The Gauntlet", which also starred the two together. In that film also Locke's character starts off as foul-mouthed and shrewish and the two characters initially hate one another before falling in love. This casts an interesting light, to say the least, on the real-life relationship of Locke and Eastwood.There are some amusing scenes arising from the efforts of Antoinette's stepmother Irene, with the assistance of a conniving lawyer, to defraud her stepdaughter of her inheritance. At one point Antoinette, having gone missing, is believed to be dead, and John is persuaded by the promise of a large windfall to confess to her murder. (The lawyer assures him that if he pleads insanity he will only receive a few years in a mental institution). The film is, however, more than simply a rom-com. It also deals with the theme of the way in which the enduring legend of the Old West continued to influence American culture even in the late twentieth century.Clint Eastwood's Billy character has been described as a parody of the sort of Western heroes he played in films such as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" or "High Plains Drifter", but in fact he is both a parody of and a celebration of the traditional Western hero. Billy's stage persona is similar to that of Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger, the Western hero who tries to live by a simple moral code- honour, patriotism, decency, courage, truthfulness and (for the children) always do your schoolwork and respect your parents. Cinema Westerns of the sixties and seventies such as "The Wild Bunch" and "Lawman" had often taken a revisionist view of the Code of the West, trying to show that it was a myth. (Eastwood himself was later to make "Unforgiven", possibly the greatest of all revisionist Westerns). Of course, the Code of the West was a myth- not everyone in the West was honourable, patriotic, decent, courageous or truthful. The word "myth", however, in its original Greek sense, did not simply mean a falsehood. It meant a story which was not necessarily literally true but which had a deeper, symbolic significance. The significance of the Myth of the West for Billy is that he himself believes it. It is not merely a stage persona. He has his faults, but for the most part he does make a genuine effort to live by the code he preaches (which is why Antoinette, who has spent most of her life surrounded by phonies, ends up falling for him).In a scene at the end Billy and his troupe give their show, to the strains of a rousing Sousa march, in a tent symbolically made up of American flags stitched together. This indicates that this is a patriotic film, although this is not a gung-ho, military patriotism. Leonard, the Vietnam deserter, is treated sympathetically, which perhaps suggests that Eastwood is not the die-hard conservative he is sometimes assumed to be by both admirers and detractors. Rather, it is a wider patriotism celebrating the way in which America allows its citizens to reinvent themselves, to realise their full potential, to be whatever they want to be. Billy's circus may be small-scale and amateurish, but it has allowed Billy and his colleagues to live out their dreams. Billy, the shoe salesman with a criminal record has become, on his own terms at least, a sort of a hero. The Wild West Show thus functions as a microcosm of the Wild West itself, which in the nineteenth century allowed many Americans to make new lives for themselves, just as America has offered a fresh start in life to many people from other parts of the world.Until this film was recently shown by TCM as part of a Clint Eastwood season I had never seen it before; indeed, I had never heard of it. Having seen it, however, I am surprised it is not better-known, and can understand why Eastwood counts it among his favourites. 8/10