Overreacher

By J.C.

J.W. COOP

Directed by CLIFF ROBERTSON Screenplay by CLIFF ROBERTSON, GARY CARTWRIGHT and EDWIN SHRAKE

J.W. Coop (Cliff Robertson) is a rodeo rider who has spent the better part of a decade in stir, serving his time while winning points for the prison rodeo team. Now that he is outside again, he finds that things have changed. He returns home to discover both the old place and his old Ma (Geraldine Page) have suffered something of a decline. Hippies are abroad in the land--even in Texas. Top hands fly to rodeos in private planes and talk about their brokers.

J.W. hits the comeback trail and takes up with a backpack bohemian (Christina Ferrare) who crafts peace emblems out of licorice whips and plies him with soybeans "for high protein." Whether spurred by love or the soybeans, J.W. works himself up to No. 2 rodeo rider in the nation.

Then things start to disintegrate.

J.W. proposes marriage. The girl promptly deserts him. Stuck behind the rodeo champ ("Second's the bottom"), J.W. takes a last desperate shot at glory by riding the toughest bull in the rodeo even though his leg is in a cast. He winds up gored on the horns of his greatest triumph.

The movie is at its best in its careful, funky observations of rodeo life, from small-time local contests to the boisterous extravaganzas that look more like circuses. Fledgling Director Robertson has a good eye for the back roads of America and a sharp feeling for what it is like to be short on money and hope.

It is the big time that messes up both J.W. and the movie. Robertson trots out the usual herd of metaphors for contemporary alienation. When J.W. facetiously gives his address as " 1313 Luck Road," it comes out sounding smug and pompous because the rest of the film deals too literally in such symbolic shorthand, as in the goring episode. J.W '.

Coop starts out as a delicate, melancholy yarn and gets trampled in a stampede of meaning.

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