Bronco Billy (1980)
7/10
The myth of the old west
3 August 2016
Clint Eastwood labels Bronco Billy as one of his favorite films so who am I to tell him different. It is a fun and quirky movie, kind of like You Can't Take It With You. He certainly has gathered together a collection of people similar to Grandpa Vanderhoff's friends and family.

Playing the title role Eastwood is the owner and star of a wild west show Eastwood has in his employ a collection of characters who are uniquely loyal to him. To which he adds Sondra Locke who is one of those rich heiresses which saturated films in the Thirties.

Bronco Billy's outfit is hardly like Buffalo Bill Cody's show nor even like the one John Wayne was the impresario of in Circus World. It's just scraping by, it's people not being paid for weeks on end. But none of them will leave him.

Locke's been left flat by her husband and she's hired by Eastwood not knowing who she is as essentially a come-on. She's attractive enough to be one. Locke learns soon enough that the people in the show are there to escape their own reality and step into the mythology of the wild west. Eastwood himself has created Bronco Billy, his own real life was nothing to brag about. He feels to some degree that people can be what they want and he gives those who are with him a chance to do just that.

Clint Eastwood in his westerns certainly created enough mythology of the old west steps back a bit from those characters in Bronco Billy. It's a curiously old fashioned film though, the kind I wish were still made.

What I wouldn't give to work in Bronco Billy's show.
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