What a difference a half century makes. When Jeri Bondi (Gena Rowlands) laments her husband's incarceration for helping illegals cross the border, she mentions the consequences one might face for violating real borders, real fences, real laws, and consequently, getting mixed up in real trouble. No way anyone involved with the picture could have foreseen the day when all of the 'real borders' stuff is just a moot point, and authorities are told to stand down by a lawless administration. This film couldn't even be made today, it wouldn't have any relevance.
I'm reading some of the other reviews for this movie and scratching my head over the comments linking it to "First Blood". From the outset in that film, Rambo was the character who was being provoked; here it's Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) doing the provoking all the way. I didn't find Burns to be a sympathetic character in that respect as he went looking for trouble and generally found it. With Stallone's Rambo, you want to root for the guy who's being pursued by a megalomaniac sheriff who has a distorted sense of right and wrong. Sure, you had Gutierrez (George Kennedy) here as the stand in for Brian Dennehy's Sheriff Teasle, but he was an ancillary character. The principal sheriff, Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau) appeared to have a more realistic approach to apprehending Burns. When he didn't 'recognize' him at the end of the story as the man he was chasing, it said a lot about the sympathy he had for a man defying the odds and coming up short.
There's an aura of the passing of the Old West that's quite pervasive with this story, and a lot more pronounced with the juxtaposition of Burns out in the wilderness and all of modern day technology (for 1962) brought to bear against him. Burns himself describes what it's like to be the last cowboy when he explains to Jeri why they never hooked up - "Cause I'm a loner clear down deep to my very guts. You know what a loner is? He's a born cripple. He's crippled because the only person he can live with is himself". I've spent a lot of time thinking about that because for this cowboy it strikes very close to home.
I'm reading some of the other reviews for this movie and scratching my head over the comments linking it to "First Blood". From the outset in that film, Rambo was the character who was being provoked; here it's Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) doing the provoking all the way. I didn't find Burns to be a sympathetic character in that respect as he went looking for trouble and generally found it. With Stallone's Rambo, you want to root for the guy who's being pursued by a megalomaniac sheriff who has a distorted sense of right and wrong. Sure, you had Gutierrez (George Kennedy) here as the stand in for Brian Dennehy's Sheriff Teasle, but he was an ancillary character. The principal sheriff, Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau) appeared to have a more realistic approach to apprehending Burns. When he didn't 'recognize' him at the end of the story as the man he was chasing, it said a lot about the sympathy he had for a man defying the odds and coming up short.
There's an aura of the passing of the Old West that's quite pervasive with this story, and a lot more pronounced with the juxtaposition of Burns out in the wilderness and all of modern day technology (for 1962) brought to bear against him. Burns himself describes what it's like to be the last cowboy when he explains to Jeri why they never hooked up - "Cause I'm a loner clear down deep to my very guts. You know what a loner is? He's a born cripple. He's crippled because the only person he can live with is himself". I've spent a lot of time thinking about that because for this cowboy it strikes very close to home.