Movie Mahal

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A forgotten Western from the early 70s but an altogether brilliantly funny one with Dennis Hopper in fine form as Texas train robber and proletarian semi-Marxist desperado Kid Blue who decides to go straight in a small town in Texas.

A comedy Western with a latent counterculture dimension, Kid Blue’s attempts to adjust to the banality of conventional town life is fraught with the complexities of trying to steer a course through the incongruous and disingenuous figures of so-called orthodoxy. Befriended by Reese Ford (Warren Oates) and his wife who are both excited and intrigued by Kid Blue’s non-conformist attitude, integration becomes an obstacle since his rebellious, maverick nature cannot be accommodated into what is a fast-evolving consumerist capitalist industrialist system, and which is encapsulated in the symbolism of the factory in the town.

Much of the film is structured around comical yet perilous situations in which Kid Blue is often rescued by semi-angelic figures like the Sheriff (Ben Johnson) who like many in the town are somewhat ambivalent about how they feel about an outlaw they secretly admire and loathe for going against the grain. The revisionist aspect is resolutely the ways in which we witness a demythologising of the outlaw, stripping away the mystique to leave us with an exploration of what it means to live on your own terms in what was the West’s idea of a new civilised society.