Monte Walsh movie review & film summary (1970)

Times have been hard for her, too. Prostitution, she observes, is a profession of diminishing returns, and she has had to move to a railroad town nearby. With the consolidation of all the ranches into one big spread managed by some financial wizards from back East, jobs for cowboys have become scarce. And thus, inevitably, there has been less call for her services. Monte rides over to the railroad town and asks her what she thinks about the idea of getting married.

Moreau, in a moment of luminous acting, thinks it over and then smiles and says "I like it" in a way that can't be described. Then she reflects: "Of course marriage is a common ambition in my profession."

But not in Monte's. "Cowboys don't get married," he observes to Chet. So he toys with the idea of stunt-riding for a Wild West show, but the thought of all those concrete cities without any open spaces is too much for him. And so he is faced, toward the end of the movie, with a very lonely desperation. This may be the first three-handkerchief Western.

There have been, I mentioned, several movies recently about the passing of the old West. They seem to be inspired by different kinds of motives. Some hands in Hollywood seem to believe that the Western itself is dead, that since you can't seriously peddle the old good guy-bad guy plots, you have to dismantle them and bury them.

"The Wild Bunch" and "The Professionals," each in its own way, were about the shortage of work for gunslingers. They suggested that violence had gone out of style in the West, that a gun on the hip was no longer required in polite society. "The Wild Bunch" seemed to seek death almost suicidally in the last half of that great movie: they'd lived by the gun and they had to die by it, ironically, because they knew no other way to make a living.

"Monte Walsh" is set at the same psychological moment in the West, but it takes a quieter and, on the whole, more thoughtful approach. There's a fair amount of gunplay, yes, and Marvin has a well-staged action scene where he tries to tame a bronco and succeeds in destroying half a town. But mostly the movie sticks close to ordinary life: to the camaraderie of the bunkhouse and the range, to the everyday life of the working cowboy and to the shy and beautiful love between the cowboy and the prostitute. The movie is rough but it is almost always tender.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46mpqeslWLEorjSoWRqcWdl