After the dominant era for the Western genre from the 1940s until the early 60s, called the Golden Age of the Western, the genre followed the trend of the film industry at large in going through a fallow period before the counterculture of the 60s changed most art in the West. Young people became the primary driving force at the box office in the 60s and, desperate to capture the dollars of this newly dominant demographic, Hollywood studios took lessons from the looser, more youth-focused Spaghetti Westerns of Italy and put their money into revisionist Westerns that subverted the typical gunslinging hero trope. The term “anti-Western” or “revisionist Western” began being used to describe this new style of Westerns, and the weirder and more “trippy” and counterculture anti-Westerns then got the subgenre name “acid Western.”
Directors like Sam Peckinpah brought the American Western into a new era in the 1960s that dissected the traditional Western and tried to introduce more realism and moral complexity to the genre, and a few years later in the acid Western trend came 1972’s Bad Company. Written and directed by the team of Robert Benton and David Newman, who had recently burst onto the scene with 1967 landmark film and megahit Bonnie and Clyde, and starring Jeff Bridges in only his sixth major motion picture, Bad Company is a quirky little Western that focuses on a group of young (sometimes very young) men trying to escape conscription in the Union army and who end up wandering the wastes of the American West just doing their best to survive. While Bad Company hasn’t developed the massive reputation that some of its contemporaries like The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have garnered, it is still a great, weird, dark film that very much embodies the revolution in culture, film and the Western genre specifically that started in the early 60s and was in full swing by the 1970s.
The American Civil War Threw the United States into Chaos, and Bad Company Shows Just How Rough and Confusing It Was
- Bad Company is set in the shadow of the Civil War and is about a group of boys running from conscription.
- This representation of the Civil War and its effect on regular people eschews the stories of battles and combat mostly found in films before it in favor of a complex story about young men.
- The film is heavily influenced by the US draft for the Vietnam War that was happening while it was made, and it’s a clear metaphor for the situation of the youth of the 60s and 70s.
The story in Bad Company kicks off from scene one when upstanding and naive young man Drew Dixon (Barry Brown) hides from a Union Army conscription wagon that is there to force Drew into service. Unlike many local boys who are already behind its bars, Drew’s family successfully keeps him hidden, and when the coast is clear, they give him $100 and tell him to head West to stay safe (Drew’s brother was already lost to the war, and the family doesn’t want to lose their only other kid). On the way, Drew is robbed by fast-talking fellow war-dodger Jake Rumsey (Jeff Bridges), who he runs into shortly after and fights to try and get his money back.
After wrecking a local pastor’s house in their fight, Jake convinces Drew to talk and eventually the two go to meet Jake’s gang of fellow youths on the run. The gang then sets out to the West, trying to survive with only two barely adults leading a handful of teenagers and one ten-year-old, forced to live off the land (which they don’t know how to do), rob (which they’re very bad at) and wander aimlessly across a wilderness that has no sympathy for their plight or their age. The rest of the story is essentially little vignettes of mostly disastrous run-ins that the gang has, trying to live free and survive but slowly fracturing and losing numbers to the harsh realities of a mostly lawless land and their lack of resources, skills and smarts.
The film is set during the Civil War, and whereas many movies have been made about the actual combatants during the era (as well as many post-war Westerns), very few show the effect of a country thrown into chaos on the non-combatants. With so much of the United States still undeveloped and large swaths of the West still frontier-land and Indigenous territory, the time was chaos for many of the people caught between the two largest warring armies in the history of the continent. Whatever one thinks about people refusing to engage in a war, especially one with freeing the slaves as a major reason for the war, the boys facing conscription in Bad Company are often incredibly young, and the film shows that they generally can’t take care of themselves and have very poor grasps on adult life. They’re also caught up in the needs and wishes of their families, or lack thereof, which further murky the morality of the situation, from their being forced to run in the first place to their robbing to live through a situation where nobody is there to help them (and in fact most adults just rob them too).
While Bad Company is about the 1860s and shows a side of those years rarely seen in film, it’s impossible to disconnect it from the context in which it was made and the parallels it’s drawing to that time. At the time of Bad Company‘s filming, the United States had been in the Vietnam War for over five years, and the first draft lottery for the war had just happened on December 1, 1969. Drafts continued through the early 70s, and the already burgeoning anti-war movement that had been growing stronger since the war’s start in 1965 exploded in strength and numbers. Many at the time believed that the drafts, which were supposed to be random, were unfair to people of lower economic standing, and people who had already sent a son to the war were often resistant to sending any more, which resulted in many people trying to find ways to avoid the draft, including going on the run (often to Canada, where the law couldn’t reach them).
The comparisons between the situation in Bad Company and the 1960s and 1970s are very easy to draw and would have been impossible to ignore at the time of its release. The allegory goes further in its focus on such young, disaffected characters who feel like they’ve been left behind by a society that does not value them or their needs and desires, a direct reflection of the feelings of large numbers of youth at the time, especially those in the counterculture. Bady Company‘s focus on those youth was something very new in film as well, as before the 60s (especially with the Hays Code), films almost exclusively showed children and teens as innocents and only put them in safe situations. By making kids the focus and putting them in constant danger and talking about things like dead parents, early sexual experiences, starvation and forced military service, Bad Company broke ground by being remarkably clear-eyed about the very real and dangerous situations young people can indeed find themselves in.
Jeff Bridges Has Had a Special Magic Since His Very First Movies, and Bad Company Lets Him Shine
- While everyone in the film is good, Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown are exceptional.
- As the oldest of the crew and most world-wise, Bridges and Brown’s characters have their own side plot that crystallizes the messages of the film.
- Jeff Bridges was already Oscar-nominated before Bad Company, and he’s at his full acting prowess in the film.
While many in the gang are younger, Jeff Bridges’ Jake Rumsey and Barry Brown’s Drew Dixon are actual young men and the automatic leaders of the group, and their story is somewhat different than the rest of the boys and runs parallel to that of the gang. These two are of actual recruitment age and would be trying to make it in the world regardless of the war, and yet they are still quite young and inexperienced, trying to appear more worldly than they are while still straddling the line between child and adult. While trying to protect the gang (sometimes) and keep them moving, Jake and Drew are also flirting with a commitment to each other that’s constantly threatened by Jake’s extreme self-focus, from his years on the streets, and Drew’s idealism that itself stems from having a supportive, happy home life before the war.
The film uses this relationship as a prism to focus its primary concern of what it is to be caught up in a dangerous world that doesn’t care about individuals into a very serious question: What’s more important, one’s idea of what the world should be, or the people you find along the way that you connect with, even if they don’t fit that view? Drew and Jake clearly have something, shown in the moments they chat around a fire at night, the way they knowingly lead the gang together while understanding that they’re both winging it and, importantly, when Jake leaves the gold watch Drew cares so much about even when he mugs and robs him again.
In what is a largely fairly low-budget looking and sounding film, relying heavily on some gorgeous prairie landscapes for its visuals and the work of master cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather trilogy, Klute, All the President’s Men, Annie Hall), the film’s power comes heavily from its acting performances. The gang is all great at their depictions of brash, ill-fated youthful masculinity, as is David Huddleston as gunslinging veteran bandit leader Big Joe, but the movie is Barry Brown and Jeff Bridges’. Brown’s portrayal of a young man with a good childhood who’s entranced by the wild side of life and who has the ignorant confidence of the late teens/early 20s that pushes him to get involved in things far above his experience level is excellent and endearing, but it’s Bridges’ charm that shines off the screen.
Barry Brown was a child actor and writer, in addition to acting for TV, movies and the stage. He wrote heavily about film, including for books and magazines before he took his own life in 1978 at the young age of 27. Tragically, his sister Marilyn Brown, also an actress, also committed suicide in 1998 when she was 45.
As the child of two prominent actors (and brother to two more), Jeff Bridges’ first role was at the age of nine in action-adventure TV show Sea Hunt, which starred his father Lloyd Bridges in his first role after years of being black-listed during McCarthyism. Bridges moved to film with 1970’s Halls of Anger, a critically praised performance, and at only 22 years old he was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for The Last Picture Show (losing to fellow cast member Ben Johnson). A meteoric star from a dynastic acting family, Bridges was already a massive deal and a well-respected actor by the time he made Bad Company in 1972, and despite being only 23, he’s at his full powers of acting in the film. His beaming, easy smile, quick wit, odd mannerisms and explosive temperament that Bridges would come to be known for are all on display in Bad Company, and his lust for life and yet still youthful ignorance/ignoring of danger make the wild things that happen to Jake (and that he often causes) powerful in their tragicomedy.
Bad Company’s Vision of Adulthood as a Dangerous, Directionless Wasteland Is Still Poignant Today
- The mapless wasteland of the American West in Bad Company is an effective metaphor for entering adulthood.
- The film was an important jumping-off point for multiple careers, including Jeff Bridges’.
- Once hard to find, Bad Company is now watchable online and should be by all Western fans.
Through Bridges’ and Brown’s performances and their contentious relationship that swings from pure friendship to animosity, the harshness of the American West is highlighted brilliantly, and it provides an excellent metaphor for entering adulthood. After leaving St. Joseph, Missouri, the pair and their gang mostly spend their time wandering with little idea of where they are and almost no supportive civilization in sight, just taking the opportunities that come before them and largely failing to make anything of them, more often than not getting in their own way and coming away damaged. Especially as a reflection of the disaffectedness of the youth of the 60s and 70s, the fact that no locations are named and the wilderness they wander feels infinite, unknowable and unbeatable works exceptionally as a fable about the confusion and difficulty of trying to make it as a young person in a vast, generally unhelpful world.
How things wrap up further the metaphor and the film’s hard lesson, and it feels like this film set Bridges in particular up for many of his future roles as a rule-bender, including the soon-to-come Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1975), where a much more grown up Bridges plays a similarly brash outlaw to Clint Eastwood’s straight man. The film indeed was a jumping-off point for both Bridges and director Robert Benton and writer David Newman, who would go on to collaborate on Superman, and would have been for Brown had he not ended his own life a few years later. As one of the lesser-known important anti-/acid Westerns, Bad Company is one of those mostly forgotten gems of an era where American film was developing a new, culturally important voice, and it very much deserves to be rediscovered by fans of the genre in the 2020s. Fun, dark, weird and with exceptional performances, its hard-hitting look at young adulthood is rich in themes and entertaining in execution, and thanks to a recent restoration, it’s finally watchable again, available to rent online and on Bluray.