Bronco Billy (DVD)

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If you can overlook the warm fuzzies of this film, it can be charming, lighthearted fun. Clint Eastwood went through a period in the late seventies and eighties when he chose to step out of character and do comedy: "Every Which Way But Loose" (1978), "Any Which You Can" (1980), "City Heat" (1984), "Pink Cadillac" (1989). "Bronco Billy" (1980) was the best of the lot.

Eastwood stars and directs in this story of a modern, big-city dreamer living the life of an old-fashioned cowboy in a wild west show. It gives the actor plenty of opportunity to caricature himself, which he does with seeming glee. The movie comes perilously close to the ridiculous at times but never oversteps its bounds. Perhaps this is why of all the films he's made, Eastman claims it as one of his personal favorites.

When I was very young, my favorite cowboy star was Roy Rogers. As I got older, it was John Wayne, Randolph Scott, then Eastwood. So, it's a kick seeing Eastwood doing a take-off on the kind of true-blue, children's hero Rogers epitomized. Eastwood plays Bronco Billy McCoy, sharpshooter, trick rider, and owner of Bronco Billy's Wild West Show, a flea-bag traveling circus of ragtag cowpoke entertainers. Billy speaks in wonderfully corny Western clichés ("Howdy, pardner") and lives by his own personal Code of the West ("Remember to say your prayers at night, and never kill a man unless it's absolutely necessary").

In reality, he's a phony, a former shoe salesman from New Jersey; and the rest of his crew are no more cowboys than he is. Scatman Crothers plays the show's master of ceremonies, Doc Lynch, once convicted as a medical charlatan. Sam Bottoms is Lasso Leonard James, rope twirler and army deserter. Bill McKinney is Lefty LeBow, a one-time embezzler. Dan Vadis is Chief Big Eagle, an authentic Native-American snake dancer and part-time novelist. And Sierra Pecheur plays his wife and helper, Lorraine Running Water, inauthentic Native-American. Despite their pasts, they struggle to get by, always broke but always together, always family.

Billy has two defining moments in the film, the first when he becomes a hero by foiling a bank robbery. He probably would have left it alone, but when one of the robbers has the effrontery to knock a little boy's jar of pennies to the floor, he moves to action, shooting the guns out of both the robbers' hands. The second moment is more enterprising and more truthful. While trying to bribe a small-town sheriff to release one of his men from jail, Billy is actually challenged to a duel by the gloating, gun-slinging sheriff! Eastwood and writer Dennis Hackin could have taken the easy route here, and we half expect them to. But they don't, and bless 'em for it. Instead, the movie maintains a credible balance, and, like Billy, the audience must grin and bear it.

What isn't so credible, however, is the film's major subplot involving Sandra Locke as a rich, spoiled New York City heiress, Antoinette Lily, who gets involved with Billy's show. According to her father's will, Miss Lily has to marry before she's thirty in order to inherit millions, so she goes out West to wed a dimwit she doesn't even love named John Arlington (Geoffrey Lewis). The night of their marriage, she will have nothing to do with her new husband, and the next morning he leaves her in a snit, taking her car, clothes, and money with him. Stranded in the middle of Idaho, she runs into Billy, who just happens to be looking for a new assistant, one who isn't afraid of being shot or stabbed in the show's big act. For reasons never made clear, she joins up with the troupe. Maybe it's because she knows it will displease her stepmother and the old family lawyer, both of whom are out for her money.