Brown and Beige

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

RANCHO DELUXE

Directed by FRANK PERRY

Screenplay by THOMAS McGUANE

Rancho Deluxe is the sort of movie that aspires to being shocking and dangerous in a portrayal of contemporary life. It achieves some interesting images and some strong dramatic moments, but its good impulses are blunted by creative caution.

The anti-heroes are a kid on the run from middle-class respectability (Jeff Bridges) and his faithful half-breed companion (Sam Waterston), who seems, in his inarticulate way, to aspire to the free life enjoyed by his Indian ancestors. They begin the film as prankish, thoughtless one-cow-at-a-time rustlers. They end it in Rancho Deluxe--a prison camp--after they fail to pull off a major cattle heist. Their nemesis is the biggest, most blustering rancher in Montana (Clifton James); his name is Brown. Their undoing is an ancient range detective (Slim Pickens) who is smart enough to stand still and wait for the miscreants to make a mistake, while everyone else is running off in all directions to look for them. The detective's name, alas, is Beige.

Big Sky. Fun and games with names at this level (a couple of greedy cowpokes named Burt and Curt are also present) is a way of signifying--on the cheap--that the movie aims at something more than realistic portraiture. Director Perry and Writer McGuane are desperate for us to see that their characters' obsession with keeping outworn frontier traditions alive is really childish role playing. This is most evident in the movie's treatment of women. All are either sexually restless (notably Elizabeth Ashley as the rancher's wife) because their men are so wrapped up in fantasies, or (like Charlene Dallas) exploited as bit players in the dreamers' lives.

Perry finds some arresting images to underscore his theme. Beautiful Navajo rugs are spread out for an airing under the big sky as a cowboy works them over with a weirdly out-of-place vacuum cleaner; a brand-new Lincoln auto is pumped full of slugs from an ancient buffalo rifle. But Perry appears to distrust his taste for surrealism and settles too often for the merely slick. Similarly, McGuane, a highly regarded young novelist, tells us too little about the characters in this original screenplay. Rancho Deluxe might have been a film of considerable originality, something on the order of last year's under rated Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (which also starred Bridges). Instead, all it offers is conventional, well-paced entertainment, which provides an inadequate context for a few sudden shows of genuine strength.

--Richard Schickel

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