Desperado for Hire

By JAY COCKS

KID BLUE Directed by JAMES FRAWLEY Screenplay by EDWIN SHRAKE

Robbing trains and stirring up trouble, he is known as Kid Blue. But when he gets fed up with a bandit's life, he uses his proper name, Bickford Waner. Bickford (Dennis Hopper) leaves his outlaw ways behind him and heads down the trail to Dime Box, Texas, where he puts up at the boardinghouse and lands a job sweeping out the barbershop. Polishing shoes or eating supper with the other boarders, though, Bickford just seems to stir people up. "You got no respect, boy," a shoe salesman (Ralph Waite) informs him one evening. "What am I supposed to have respect for?" is all Bickford wants to know.

There are obvious and deliberate echoes here of Brando's classic challenge in The Wild One. "What are you rebelling against?" one harried adult asked him, and Brando just shrugged and said, "Whatya got?" What is different in Kid Blue is the tone. Brando's cyclist was a threat, an aggressor; Hopper's outlaw is a puzzled, slightly paranoid victim. Trying to go straight and live right, he only makes the citizens more suspicious. They are resentful in some vague way, and the sheriff, Mean John ("But only my friends can call me that") Simpson, is disbelieving. "I seen boys like you before," he tells Bickford, "and there's no good in ya."

Proud custodian of all the vested moral interests of the community, Mean John makes sure that Bickford receives regular doses of harassment. After some puzzling personal encounters and some unprofitable employment, Bickford decides to be the lawless kid everyone suspects he is. He concludes that the only way to save his pride and salvage his honor is to rob the fattest safe in town.

Kid Blue is a quirkish, laid-back, jolly film, rich in resonance, full of scrupulously affectionate detail for a West that changed too fast and too often ever to be called "Old." It is a wry paean to a life of crime, and displays a robust contempt for law, order and the encroachments of civilization. Bickford, as dexterously played by Hopper, shows signs occasionally of becoming a kind of surrogate James Dean, a prairie rebel without a cause. Hopper started working in films about the same time as Dean (they appeared together in Rebel Without a Cause), and in rather the same style. But Hopper is an actor of quick cunning, and he manages to get the movie back on course whenever it tends to become a little sentimental about the lot of the misunderstood loner. He has the uncanny ability to transform himself instantly from a ravaged outcast into a kid in a cowboy outfit on his way to First Communion.

Scenarist Shrake has provided some good, funky dialogue, and Frawley is a director who gives his actors time and room to move around in their parts. Warren Gates is exemplary as a factory worker enamored of the ancient Greeks ("They went around barefooted, wearing sheets and other comfortable things, and men could love each other and not be ashamed"). Lee Purcell fetching as his wife. Peter Boyle as a preacher with an interest in aeronautics and narcotics, and Ben Johnson as Mean John make a fine couple of Texas crazies.

There is also an absolutely smashing, irresistibly sexy performance by Janice Rule as an "actress" called Janet Conforto, who shows up in Dime Box one day "to do a single." The photography (by Billy Williams, who shot Women in Love) is elegant without ever being too fussy or ostentatious.

Mellow and good-humored and not entirely serious about itself, Kid Blue shows it is still possible to bring a newer, fresher, more contemporary tone to the western while still honoring what is best and strongest in the traditional form.

Jay Cocks

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