The Missouri Breaks
The Missouri Breaks
PG | 19 May 1976 (USA)
The Missouri Breaks Trailers

When vigilante land baron David Braxton hangs one of the best friends of cattle rustler Tom Logan, Logan's gang decides to get even by purchasing a small farm next to Braxton's ranch. From there the rustlers begin stealing horses, using the farm as a front for their operation. Determined to stop the thefts at any cost, Braxton retains the services of eccentric sharpshooter Robert E. Lee Clayton, who begins ruthlessly taking down Logan's gang.

Reviews
Hellen

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

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Kaelan Mccaffrey

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

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Jakoba

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

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Rexanne

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

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acebros-1

You know how things seem So Cool when you're stoned, and then you find them later and shake your head? I think that's what happened to this movie, or, rather, to the people who made this movie: a giant giddy collective lapse of judgment. Many many fine elements, exceptional, sometimes brilliant, but, ungrounded, and wildly self-indulgent. So, doesn't quite work, though you certainly come away (and it's been 20 years since I've seen it) with some indelible images.Not the only film of the Seventies with this problem, by any means - one that comes to mind is Le Voyou (The Crook) with Trintignant by C Lelouch from 1970 -- it's easy to imagine them watching the rushes through a cloud of smoke and saying "Wow...." Another case of Homer on the nod.

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Robert J. Maxwell

A sometimes amusing tale of four or five small-time horse thieves in Montana. The movement of horses across the wide high plains is getting a bit dicey so the inexperienced gang holds up a train in a comic scene in order to buy a small farm in which they plan to stash their stolen herds until market time. Something like that.Jack Nicholson is one of the gang. As the gang repairs the farm just to make it look functional, Nicholson finds that he rather LIKES planting all those cabbages and pruning the apple trees in the orchard. He's beginning to put down as many roots as his carrots. The rest of the clumsy gang carry on their nefarious trade.Meanwhile, an important local rancher named Braxton sees his horses stolen and, soon enough, his nymphomaniacal daughter begins taking up with Nicholson. This irritates Braxton, and he hires Marlon Brando as a "regulator", that is, a private law enforcement gun for hire whose specialty is exploding people's heads at a distance with a high-powered rifle. Brando disposes of the gang one by one, even after Braxton fires him, and there is a final confrontation between him and Nicholson.The best thing about the movie -- or the worst thing, depending on your taste -- is Marlon Brando's performance. It exceeds the unpredictable and reaches for the bizarre. He wears outlandish costumes, switches from one phony accent to another without adumbration.Sometimes I had the feeling that the director, Arthur Penn, simply let the camera roll while Brando improvised lines and bits of business. One of the most singular scenes has Brando alone with two horses in the wilderness. He converses with the two horses. He allows one to nibble its way up the carrot that he, Brando, holds in his mouth. "You have the eyes of Cleopatra," he murmurs lovingly. He holds a carrot out to the other animal and then slaps its cheek when it tries to bite the carrot. "That's faw yaw deceit and treachery," he scolds, using a high-flown English accent adopted from the Fletcher Christian character from "Mutiny on the Bounty." I don't know whether Brando was enjoying himself or not but I was laughing like hell. He trumpets his own idiosyncrasy earlier, a legend in his own bathtime. These entire scenes, like a few others, are utterly absurd.Nicholson is likable but it's not one of his more memorable performances. He seems to be one of those actors -- Paul Newman is another -- who is at his best when he gets the right role but otherwise slips into a default delivery. The girl with whom Nicholson winds up is attractive enough but sounds as if she'd just graduated from Smith College. The supporting cast is made up mostly of stalwarts who put in a professional effort.On the whole, you know what it looks like in its structure? "Bonny and Clyde", except that the despised forces of law and order are not dispersed among small-town coppers but are instead concentrated in the persona of Brando, the villainous murderer, and the embittered rancher who has hired him.

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Michael_Elliott

Missouri Breaks, The (1976) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Somewhat notorious Western about a group of horse thieves (led by Jack Nicholson) who are stalking a rich owner who grows tired of them so he hires a "regulator" (Marlon Brando) to track them down and kill them. THE MISSOURI BREAKS was released to some incredibly negative reviews and even today many people consider this one of the worst movies ever made. I certainly wouldn't go that far as there are many entertaining moments to be had here but when you consider Brando was coming off THE GODFATHER and LAST TANGO IN Paris and Nicholson was coming off ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, one can't help but wish that the film had been much better. At its core this is just another film with the message that the "bad" guys usually aren't nearly as cruel or evil as the so-called "good" guys that are paid to go after them. This film really is a complete mess because it's never quite clear what director Arthur Penn is wanting to go for. At times this seems just like a comedy. At other times it features some graphic violence and dark tones. It's never quite clear what to make of the character played by Brando because he's just so weird that it's hard to be scared of him and he's too campy to really take too serious. As for Brando, God love him because we get the type of over-the-top and outrageous performance that only a genius could deliver. I wouldn't dare say the performance was great but you really have to give the actor credit for delivery a "performance" unlike anything you've ever seen before. The "free" natured style that Brando brings to the character works fine but if you read anything about the film's production you will learn that the director pretty much gave up on the actor and just let him do whatever he wanted. This will account for the strange clothes, the strange weapons and other strange things that are constantly going on with the performance. It's so outrageous and strange that you can't help but be entertained by it but at the same time it's tone is certainly going against everything else in the film. Nicholson is pretty much by-the-numbers but he's at least entertaining and it's fun seeing the two actors working together even if it's obvious that many of their scenes together were shot at different times. Kathleen Lloyd makes for a good love interest and we get good performances by Frederic Forrest, Randy Quaid and Harry Dean Stanton. The "story" itself really isn't anything we haven't already seen countless times and one of the biggest problems is that the film simply goes on for way too long and it's clear at times that it doesn't seem to know where it wants to go. With that said, if you've heard that the film is among one of the worst ever made that's just simply not true. With Brando and Nicholson together you'd hope for a masterpiece but we didn't get that. Instead we just got a rather strange Western with a really strange and unique performance by Brando.

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Spikeopath

Starring two titans of cinema in Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, The Missouri Breaks sees Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde) direct, the screenplay provided by Thomas McGuane (Tom Horn) and John Williams composes the score. In the supporting cast are Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid, Kathleen Lloyd, Frederic Forrest and John McLiam. With all these people in place the film was one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Anticipation that was not met at the time as the film became a critical and commercial failure. However, time has been kind to the piece and now it shows itself to be far better than the iffy reputation that's afforded it.The story is a sort of working of the Johnson County War that surfaced in the early 1890s in Wyoming, where newer ranchers tried to settle but were set upon by the more established cattle barons of the land. One of the tactics by the wealthier ranch owners was to hire gunmen to terrorise anyone they saw as a threat. Here in Penn's movie we see David Braxton (McLiam) ruthlessly deal with anyone who he sees as a threat to his property. However, when someone enacts revenge on him by hanging his foreman, Braxton hires himself a "Regulator" named Robert E. Lee Clayton (Brando) to seek and destroy as it were. This spells bad news for the rustling gang led by Tom Logan (Nicholson), especially since Logan has started to form a relationship with Braxton's daughter, Jane (Lloyd). Somethings gotta give and blood is sure to be spilt.The most popular word used in reviews for the film is eccentric, mostly in reference to Brando's performance. The big man was growing ever more erratic off the screen and sure enough he changed the make up of his character and improvised at his leisure. Yet it does work in the context of the movie. With his dandy nastiness playing off of an excellent Nicholson turn, McGuane's richly detailed screenplay gets added bite, particularly during the more solemn parts of the story; where patience would be tried were it not for the brogue Irish Clayton. With Penn at the helm it's no surprise to find the piece is an amalgamation of moods. Poignancy hangs heavy for the most part as we deal in the ending of an era and the need to move on. But Penn also delivers much frontier action and snatches of cheery comedy. Then there is the violence, which doubles in shock value on account of the leisurely pace that Penn has favoured. It's sad to think that one of the best splicers of moods was so upset at the reaction to his film he quit cinema for the next five years.The film, well more realistically the reaction to it, possibly sounded the death knell for the Western genre until Eastwood & Costner refused to let it die. The 70s was an intriguing decade for the Oater, with many of them veering between traditional and revisionist. But of the many that were produced, the ones that dealt with the passing of the era, where the protagonists are soon to be relics of a tamed wilderness, have an elegiac quality about them. Penn's movie is fit to sit alongside the likes of Monte Walsh, The Shootist and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Yes it's quirky and is slowly driven forward, but it has many qualities for the genre fan to gorge on. 7.5/10

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