User Reviews

Bronco Billy the sharpshooting cowboy is the owner of a modern-day travelling Wild West Show that seems to get caught in one messy situation after another. And not helping is the lack of crowd figures to their show. But nothing is going to stop Bronco Billy along with his companions from living their American dream. Through some amusing chain of events a wealthy, snobby heiress Antoinette Lilly finds herself tagging along with the show and becoming one of Bronco Billy's assistant, after her new husband leaves her stranded with nothing.

I don't understand why they think this cap gun shoots nothing but blanks. While, Eastwood (who directs and stars) goes all sentimental, warm and fuzzy for a change. It wasn't as well accepted (despite it being one of Eastwood's favourites) and flopped at the box office with it receiving such poor jabs from most critics. Not to say it's great, but this comically light-hearted character journey has a certain amount of charm within its foundation that doesn't make it as bad as you would believe. Even with this whimsical nature, it never gets overbearing. Sure it can cause you to cringe at times, but it wears its heart on its sleeve and keeps it integrity intact. More often I found myself smiling at the shenanigans, well it was hard not to. It's simply a satire worked into an old-fashioned story of familiar ingredients, were there was plenty of things going on in the plot. Who knew these traditional plot devices could maintain such interest. This is because of a delightful bunch of wholesome performances, authentically zippy purple patches of random fun and Eastwood's conventionally hardy direction makes sure it ticks along sufficiently. Even if it's nicely shot, there's nothing overly flashy or quirky creeping up, so it's all about the loyal chemistry and assured story that keeps one compelled. Streamlining the moralistic story are deep insights and symbolic brushes of the true feeling of the American dream. You got to earn it, as it's not served on up on a plate for you and from that you make the most out of it to live up to 'your' dreams. Pacing-wise it can stall in stretches, but I didn't find it boring when that did occur. The stock characters here seem to be grounded by reality, despite some silly developments (mainly involving a mental institution). The relaxed Clint Eastwood chimes in with a wonderfully touching performance. He simply chews up the material with great vigour. A terrific Sandra Locke has a screen presence that's equally as dominating in the role of the stuck-up, cold-blooded high-end dame. Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis' oddball greedy turn was marvellously madcap. The performances of Sam Bottoms, Dan Vadis, Sierra Pecheur and Bill McKinney are pleasurably sincere as Eastwood's ragtag team.

If there's one Eastwood film that's unfairly lampooned. "Bronco Billy" gets my vote. This gratifying show must go on.

I just saw Bronco Billy for the first time in its entirety tonight on DVD. This film has to be one of Eastwood's most underrated films. It's mainly a light comedy with some touches of drama thrown in. While Clint's in fine form in one of his few comedic roles the highlight is easily Scatman Crothers as Doc. He shines in each of his scenes and is the film's most likable character.

Is the film a classic? No. But it does have a lot of heart and I ended up caring about what happened to Billy and his wild west show. It's not too hard to see why this is one of Clint's personal favorite films. I think the film has a good message too. And that is if you do good deeds then good luck might just come your way. Even though he is a flawed character Billy does have a good heart and performs shows for the underprivileged for free.

If you are a in the mood for a film that will make you feel good for two hours then Bronco Billy is for you.

My rating: 7/10

This movie obviously wasn't made to break any box office records. It's just a sweet little comedy with great characters that deserves more recognition.

Maybe the biggest problem with "Bronco Billy" is that it tries to have too much story. I wouldn't had mind seeing the movie focusing on Clint and his gang alone, plenty of great characters for that! Instead we now have the movie mainly focusing on the love story.

This isn't really a comedy with "haha" moments. It more is a movie with a warm and fun feeling, which is mainly thanks to the great characters. I especially enjoyed Scatman Crothers in his role but also Clint Eastwood did a good job as a character that basically wanted to be like the western characters Eastwood previously played before.

Fun comedy by Eastwood! Give it a shot, you might end up liking it.

7/10

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After "Every Which Way But Loose" and its sequel, "Any Which Way You can" became HUGE boxoffice hits, it was something of a surprise that audiences shunned this film, which contains alot of the same elements (minus the monkey), but is just a tad more mature and serious in terms of story and character development. It's an admittedly corny but charming semi-western comedy that has Eastwood leading a ragtag "wild west show" across the country, playing at various county fairs, churches and orphanages. A snooty, spoiled, runaway heiress hooks up with the troupe, causing all kinds of complications. Eastwood directs with a sure hand; the film is rather leisurely paced, but has warm, rustic charm that's very likeable and the movie is worth discovering on video and DVD now. Fine family entertainment.

I am a Clint fan..this was one of my favorites. Not a red carpet Oscar type flick...even better. One that is enjoyable to watch and leaves you feeling good when it is over. It's been a long time since I've seen it. I have seen it several times. The chemistry between Clint and Sondra is pretty noticeable. Living in Texas, I can say that in many ways it touches upon the nature of things here, the way friends stick together, and the overall feeling of kinship that exists between people from all walks of life. So, if you want to kick back and watch a hoot of a little movie, this is it. After watching it, you may just find out how many people you have touched in your life without realizing it.

Bronco Billy (1980)

Plot In A Paragraph: Bronco Billy (Clint) an idealistic, modern-day cowboy struggles to keep his Wild West show afloat in the face of waning interest.

I always thought that this was another Malpaso Company production, (especially since it cast is full of Malpaso regulars) but it's actually produced by Second Street Films. Making this Eastwood's first film since Kelly's Heroes (10 yeas ago) not produced by his own company.

A personal favourite of Clint's, Bronco Billy is a charming little movie, very similar to Every Which Way But Loose in that it just ambles along pleasantly from one scene to another. Like EWWBL, this is another movie I'd have expected from Burt Reynolds at the time, and could easily imagine Reynolds in the role. Once again Sondra Locke is playing an unappealing character, and it's worth noting that she is once again the victim of a sexual assault (What's with that??) along with Locke, previous Eastwood Co Stars Bill McKinney, Geoffrey Lewis, Sam Bottoms, Walter Barnes, Dan Vardis and William Prince all appear.

Like their character in The Gauntlet, Eastwood and Locke are constantly at each other's throats, until the win is each other's hearts. There is a sweetness to Eastwoods Billy who frequently performs for free at orphanages and hospitals. He holds the doors for old ladies and loves kids, always taking the opportunity to warn them away from cigarettes, booze, telling lies and playing Hookey from school!!

Annoyingly, it always irritates me that Bronco Billy does not get any form of revenge on the Sheriff who humiliates him. (Much like Gazzo's driver in Rocky and the douche who humiliated Rocky in Rocky 2. "Can't you think of anything tougher to say than ooops!!")

Bronco Billy grossed $24 million at the domestic box office to end the year as the 26th highest grossing movie of 1980.

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.

'Bronco Billy' is an odd film. Parts of it seem recycled from every other Clint Eastwood movie you've ever seen: Clint's laconic persona, the bar-room brawl, the inevitably ultimately successful seduction of an initially reluctant woman; it even has a musical interlude (as had his first movie as a director, 'Play Misty for Me'), in this case provided by Merle Haggard. But the mood of the film is very strange. There's an almost-serious backdrop (the story of a group of misfits who somehow find themselves through a life that many would consider sadly pathetic) and a laid back mood, but these are accompanied by a crazy plot that is executed so perfunctorily that the film seems to be merely going through the motions; there's a zaniness to the story, but it's told without pace. There are a few good jokes, but nothing seems real or has any edge, in this gently pointless comedy.

Clint Eastwood is Bronco Billy, the leader of a Wild West troupe, one of six regular misfits who comprise a struggling-to-break-even touring show. The seventh member of the bunch is a woman, Billy's assistant, but such women never last long, and the position is chronically open. Enter Antoinette Lilly (Sandra Locke – Eastwood's girlfriend at the time). It seems Miss Lilly, as Doc (Scatman Crothers) calls her, is a would-be heiress who will only receive her long-deceased father's estate if she's married by the time she turns 30, so on the eve of that birthday she gets hitched to the cartoonish Geoffrey Lewis.

So, what's the plot of this film? It's hard to say. There's the romantic tension between Billy and Miss Lilly, but the problem is that for the first half of the movie she's so haughtily insipid and detestable that when she suddenly becomes 'one of the troupe' halfway through the film, it's not only unbelievable, but the audience is well past caring about her. There's the chronic lack of funds behind the Wild West show, but this topic isn't touched upon enough to really be the raison d'etre of the film. There's Miss Lilly's predicament of being stranded in the rural west, cut off from the funds that fuel her spoiled life of luxury (she's mistakenly believed to be dead by her family and the press). But are we really supposed to believe that she couldn't get back to New York and her waiting fortune if she gave it a bit of effort?

No, the point of this film seems to be that Billy is the leader of a family, a lovable bunch of losers who hang together through thick and thin. This is a warm, fuzzy film – or at least tries to be.

Along the way, Clint shows us his skills with a gun, even foiling a bank robbery in a shooting that is grotesquely out of place in an otherwise relatively non-violent film. One of the gang is arrested on an old draft evasion charge; Billy bribes the local sheriff. The show's tent burns down; an orphanage makes them a new one. But numerous mundane pitfalls do not a plot make.

Compounding the problem is the acting, or lack thereof. Aside from Scatman Crothers, the supporting cast is quite amateurish. Eastwood isn't on top of his game either, though he looks better simply by virtue of being surrounded by such a lackluster bunch.

And for all this, the film plods on for 116 minutes. To what point? Good question …

4 out of 10

This movie never got much acclaim for some reason. When I read where Clint Eastwood said it was a personal favorite of his I smiled, because it's mine, too.....and I like a lot of Eastwood's movies.

This isn't just my favorite Eastwood film. It's one of my all-time favorite - period! That's probably because it has tremendous charm, with a good mixture of comedy and drama with characters you care about. It's definitely different from most of Clint's movies.

The famous Eastwood glare when he's mad is still there, and he still shows his violent side. However, it's not a violent story, just a tale of a modern-day man and his little troupe who want to be cowboys and Indians, and go on tour with their little Wild West show.

The film has nice, colorful photography and looks great on DVD. However, the story, not the visuals, is the main attraction. It's refreshing to see Eastwood play a role like this where he's a Mr. Rogers-type western hero for little kids, urging children to stay on the straight and narrow, mind their parents and say their prayers before going to bed at night.

Sondra Locke also is effective as the cold newcomer who reluctantly joins the group and slowly changes from a mean-spirited, sarcastic woman to a caring person. She shows a good comedic touch and is excellent in this film, perhaps her best effort since "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter."

The rest of the cast is fun to watch, too, and it includes one of my favorite faces and voices, that of "Scatman" Crothers. There is very little profanity in this film, too, which adds to the attraction and widens the potential audience of this neglected gem. I really think it's Eastwood's most underrated movie.

What a strange one. A mix between a slapstick comedy and a romcom, Bronco Billy has some good moments. It's again a live story between Eastwood and his muse, Sondra Locke.

In a lot of ways, this is a small film. It's heartfelt and good. Unfortunately, Sondra Locke could never act. She basically drifted along on Eastwood's coattails for decades. Then sued him. Twice. And Warner Brothers. That's her legacy and Eastwood went on to make a ton more great films.

This film is not about Eastwood doing the stock 70's Eastwood, it is not about Sandra Locke, or about any other person's performance. The people in this film are lost, both in the social space of a world they cannot live in and in time. They lack most of the usual human equipment, like faith and hope (see Thomas McGuane's 'Panama'). But they blunder on, as much by default as by will, in the illusory world of Bronco Billy's road show and guided by Billy's real values, with each other. Like most of Eastwood's films, Bronco Billy is built around a story, but in this story how it comes out is not important, it is how Billy and this cast of lost souls get there. And the film has one the greatest lines in cinema history: The one Bronco Billy used to tell Antoinette what happened to his wife.

On late seventies Clint played the exotic character Philo Bedoe in "Every Which Way But Loose" together with the smarter Clyde the Orangutan, this probably explains Bronco Billy another weirdo character, a former shoe salesman from New York that somehow meets at jail the convicts Doc (Crothers) for practice illegal medicine, Lefty Lebow (Bill McKnney) for afford an expensive wife from a borrowed money of the Bank without a proper permission, Chief Big Eagle (Dan Vadis) a writer and his wife Running Water (Sierra Pecheur) actually a white girl and finally the orphan teenager Leonard James (Sam Bottoms) all them led by the hot-tempered Cowboy Bronco Billy on a road show of the wild west.

When almost from out of nowhere appears in their life the fancy and arrogant Antoinette Lilly (Sondra Locke) as dumped wife without a dime, Billy agrees that Lilly joins up the troupe as Cowgirl that a while is absent of contenders, due the bad season on lowest box office no money didn't reach at crew's hands bearing the superstitious Lefty Lebow thinks the sour girl brought bad luck, meanwhile Antoinette driven crazy the stringent Billy, in ups and downs the road show is going ahead until accidentally the circus gets fire, afterwards Billy decides rob a moving train, but the old times is over, then headed to an insane asylum gets some help from the director, which the Antoinette's husband John Arlington (Geoffrey Lewis) serving sentence for have murdered his wife.

Bronco Billy is a charming movie, exposes a good nature con-cowboy, who used to help the aimless people, all them find a place to survive chastely, in this new environment the bitter wealthy heiress Antoinette witnessed loyalty, friendship understanding and the real love, Clint was so bountiful with their follow mates, bringing them to the movie as regulars casting, Geoffrey Lewis on remarkable performance as mad guy, Bill McKinney with hook hand, Dan Vadis the former Hercules and Ursus and William Prince as devious lawer, also Sandra Locke at pick of her beauty is so sexy on that see-through skirt walking with high heels, an under appreciate movie from the great Clint Eastwood!

Thanks for reading.

Resume:

First watch: 1985 / How many: 6 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 7.5.

Clint Eastwood is back in a gun-slinging western role - but this time he's funny with it. This movie is quite funny and well worth watching. Billy is full of comedy, action and a great all around adventure film. Bronco Billy is not your average Clint Eastwood movie - it is a comedy. This film proves that Clint Eastwood has a fine sense of humor and that he's more than just a good gunslinger on film.

Bronco Billy is one of movies that makes great manatee. If you liked the films: "Blazing Saddles", "Every Which Way But Loose" or any of the serious Western films starring Clint Eastwood - then you might enjoy Bronco Billy.

7.5/10

It is my personal opinion that this has to be one of the worst films Clint Eastwood ever made. I watched a second time as I didn't think he could do anything this bad, but was rewarded with the viewing of the poor performance of Eastwood and Locke. The story was long and drawn out and didn't show any promise of getting good until the end and then it was too late.

A lesson to be learned...Don't put someone in a movie just because you're sleeping with them.

Locke is awful, always was, always will be.

Aside from every scene she is in, the film is ok.

BRONCO BILLY (2+ outta 5 stars) Kind of an odd, little movie for Clint Eastwood... not really funny enough to be called a comedy and not really dramatic enough to be called a drama. This quirky character study of the people involved in a modern day "wild west show" has decent enough dialogue and the performers (most from the usual Eastwood stable of the time, including soon-to-be-ex-wife Sondra Locke) make viewing the film painless enough... but by the time it's over it will have you pondering exactly what the point of this movie could have been. I guess it was just the kind of movie Clint wanted to make at the time (he produced and directed) and after his huge success with "Every Which Way But Loose" who was going to tell him "no"? Clint plays the lead character, the star and owner of a traveling western show (filled with some of the most unconvincing "frontier" characters that you could imagine). After a long string of female assistants that don't quite work out, he happens upon a depressed, spoiled rich girl who is going through some bad luck of her own. The expected personality clashes and romance ensue. (It's kind of hard to accept Eastwood and Locke's romance in view of their later domestic problems... much like it's hard to watch anything with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow without cringing.) It's all pleasant enough if you're in the mood for this sort of thing... but not a career high for Clint by any means.

This isn't Oscar material by any means.... but i had the chance to watch this again one saturday afternoon..(like the westerns when i was a kid)...i'm too young to remember the serials of the 50's the first time around, but i got more than a bargain in re-runs..shows like Roy Rogers really meant something to me. Just like the family visit to a very small theme park called Wild West City. Now grown, Wild West City looks rather shabby, it probably always did, but not to a kid. Bronco Billy shows the shabbiness of the small Wild West show but it also imparts many of the good feelings given by the cowboy shows of old.... I have to think that Clint Eastwood made this his tribute to the genre, i felt the same chills during scenes in the movie that i felt upon seeing Roy Rogers say the "cowboy prayer" in a tribute after his death..the same happy tear when Roy sang "Here's Hopin' " with Clint Black on the tribute cd...and, oh yes, the movie is wrapped around a cute black comedy resembling Overboard with Goldie Hawn. Sondra Locke, his then live-in, is good as the love interest. Through her we learn of Bronco Billy's unique view of the world and the wishful longing that we can all be what we want to be................YOU JUST NEED TO WANT IT BADLY ENOUGH !!! (and reach out to the life that is waiting for us)

Sondra Locke stinks in this film, but then she was an awful 'actress' anyway. Unfortunately, she drags everyone else (including then =real life boyfriend Clint Eastwood down the drain with her. But what was Clint Eastwood thinking when he agreed to star in this one? One read of the script should have told him that this one was going to be a real snorer. It's an exceptionally weak story, basically no story or plot at all. Add in bored, poor acting, even from the normally good Eastwood. There's absolutely no action except a couple arguments and as far as I was concerned, this film ranks up at the top of the heap of natural sleep enhancers. Wow! Could a film BE any more boring? I think watching paint dry or the grass grow might be more fun. A real stinker. Don't bother with this one.