Bad Company

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Set during the Civil War, Bad Company stars Barry Brown as a Northern boy, Drew Dixon, who heads West to avoid getting drafted. He falls under the spell of Jake Rumsey (Jeff Bridges), an easygoing young con artist. Drew joins Jake's gang of boy bandits, who live by their wits and try to avoid confrontation with adult criminals like Big Joe (David Huddleston). It is Drew who must eventually save Jake from hanging, even though he realizes that his intervention could lead to his own execution. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: English
• Features:
  • • [None specified]

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Robert Benton

• Producer:

  Stanley Jaffe

• Screenwriter:

  David Newman, Robert Benton

• Cinematographer:

  Gordon Willis

• Composer (Music Score):

  Harvey Schmidt

• Editor:

  Ron Kalish, Ralph Rosenblum

• Production Designer:

  Paul Sylbert

• Art Director:

  Robert Gundlach

• Set Designer:

  Audrey Blasdel-Goddard

• Costume Designer:

  Anthea Sylbert

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  Gene S. Cantamessa

• First Assistant Director:

  Howard W. Koch

REVIEW:

• Making his assured directorial debut with an intelligently entertaining genre piece, Robert Benton takes a decidedly unsentimental view of the frontier myths of male bonding and opportunity for the Western Bad Company (1972). Set during the Civil War, Benton and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) collaborator David Newman's screenplay subtly evokes the Vietnam era in its focus on two young draft dodgers, pious Barry Brown and larcenous Jeff Bridges. Rather than a place of freedom and opportunity, the West they find is an unglamorous prairie wasteland of petty thieves, physical threats, rough justice, and shifting loyalties. Benton maintains a low-key, thoughtful tone occasionally leavened by bits of humor, while Gordon Willis' expressive, autumnal cinematography and Harvey Schmidt's piano score quietly underline the evolution of Brown's upstanding values as he confronts the West's moral relativity. Though not as well-known as such other contemporary revisionist Westerns as The Wild Bunch (1969) and Little Big Man (1970), Bad Company stands as another engaging elegy to the ultimate American myth. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi