Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s a lesser known Western, Harry Tracy, Desperado:
Harry Tracy, Desperado (1982)
and next week’s film, L’oeuvre au noir:
L’oeuvre au noir (1988)
Reviews of Harry Tracy, Desperado:
Letterboxd says:
In the ’50’s and ’60’s Western, a snowy landscape meant a chance for some stunning Technicolor photography, vast 70mm panoramas, and a howling wind just beyond a big wooden door. In the ’80’s Western, it just means death, the end of the line. Even if artists and the public may have only been dimly aware of this at the time, the Western had died suddenly, and from about ’74 onward they had a tendency to be named The Last of this or The Final that; if they weren’t parodies, they were hunted, desperate affairs, as dark and critical as the revisionist Westerns before it, but exhaustedly certain that they could make none of those revisions. No one would have guessed it, but the hippies fought valiantly for, and won the Western in the national culture wars of the ’60s and ’70s, and in a Reagan-ascendent ’80’s, the Western, stranded on the left, found itself powerless and irrelevant. Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson were the Western stars of the ’80s, the metaphorical statute of John Wayne having been successfully torn down, until Sam Elliott appeared as the first right-coded cowboy of the ’80’s, late into the decade. Harry Tracy (1982) feels much like Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1984) or even Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), a desperate plea from the last of a cohort of revolutionaries. If anything, it suffers slightly from its reaction against its day, since some of that coke-propelled ’80’s super-violence may have earned this a place as the true spiritual epilogue to The Wild Bunch (1969). Like many left-coded ’80’s films, it feels sometimes like vegetables, and many Spaghetti Westerns of the previous decade were as relentlessly bleak; those, however, were a Catholic bleakness, which involves some acceptance of death, and this, is a deeply American Protestant one, a threat that you will be left outside in the cold with no money, and anywhere you find to sit, you won’t be allowed to sit long.
Cinefile says:
Refreshingly slanted towards its love interest, but inadequately tight in its pacing and varying in tone, this western takes after Butch and Sundance in many ways and provides a long overdue opportunity for Dern to carry a film. The interrupted barn-raising climax is nicely handled; maybe it came too soon after The Grey Fox to garner the attention it deserves.
Running Wild Films says:
However, he’s not the center of attention here. Bruce Dern, one of America’s finest character actors, plays the titular outlaw. It’s hard to say this is one of his best performances since his decades-long career is full of them but I will say he carries the movie from beginning to end with his wit, energy, and his usual eccentric flair. Lightfoot is good but under-used. It’s a shame the script didn’t balance the portrayal of Dern’s outlaw and Lightfoot’s lawman a little more. We never get a good sense of who he is and that would have made their odd relationship more effective.
My take:
Director Graham and Dern provide a solid Western, a heavily fictionalized account of the last days of the outlaw Harry Tracy. It’s not one of the greats; it never rises above the situational humor and action sequences to attain the mythic quality that the best Westerns do. But it is a rollicking adventure. It’s not gratuitously violent and it has a compelling romantic thread. The “love to hate you” relationship between Dern’s and Gordon Lightfoot’s characters is an entertaining sub-theme. I’m giving it a ⭐, definitely worth a look but just once. Note: A better take on the wryly humorous “lovable scoundrel” Western is Bad Company with Jeff Bridges:
You have to pay. I think it’s worth it.
Director: William A. Graham
Writers: David Lee Henry, R. Lance Hill
Actors: Bruce Dern, Helen Shaver, Gordon Lightfoot, Michael C. Gwynne
Plot (Spoilers!):
At the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, most of the famous outlaws of the Old West were either in prison, on death row, or taking a dirt nap. One man was left standing free. A gentleman bandit named Harry Tracy (Dern). Tracy is on the run and wanted by the Feds. He’s made a mockery of law enforcement with his numerous escapes. U.S. Marshall Morrie Nathan (Lightfoot) is leading the hunt, and he has a deep grudge with Tracy.
Making his way to a bug-out cabin deep in the woods, Tracy encounters David Merrill (Gwynne), who has come to paint the great outlaws of the West. He hooks up with Tracy and becomes an increasingly violent outlaw himself. Tracy engages in an array of robberies and holdups with his new partner but his real goal is to find his love Catherine Tuttle (Shaver) in the frontier town of Portland. After a serious of misadventures, the crooks find themselves in prison and at each other’s throats.
The duo escapes and Tracy is reunited with Tuttle. It is revealed that Merrill intended to betray Tracy and a duel ensues that leaves Merrill dead. Tracy and his love now undertake a journey seeking a safe haven and the struggles they encounter only deepen their feelings for one another. The law is homing in on them though, and in the final scenes of the movie Tracy finds himself trapped in a cornfield surrounded by soldiers and vigilantes. After a blazing gun battle, he takes his own life to avoid capture.
***
Bonus: Doctor Builds 4,000+ Near-Death Experience Database (What He Found)
Today’s afterlife experience is from Dr. Jeffrey Long. Jeffery describes how his curiosity about near-death experiences led him to found the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation(NDERF), which has collected over 4,000 detailed accounts using rigorous survey methods. His research highlights consistent global patterns—out-of-body awareness, encounters with light and loved ones, life reviews, and lasting positive life changes—supporting the view that consciousness may persist beyond the body.
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