Bad Company

Director: Robert Benton Robert Benton

Overview

Set during the Civil War, Bad Company stars Barry Brown as a Northern boy, Drew Dixon, who heads West to avoid getting drafted. He falls under the spell of Jake Rumsey (Jeff Bridges), an easygoing young con artist. Drew joins Jake's gang of boy bandits, who live by their wits and try to avoid confrontation with adult criminals like Big Joe (David Huddleston). It is Drew who must eventually save Jake from hanging, even though he realizes that his intervention could lead to his own execution.

Product Details

Release Date:	12/03/2019
UPC:	0032429333964
Original Release:	1972
Rating:	PG
Source:	Paramount
Time:	1:49:00
Sales rank:	44,137

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Ed Lauter	Big Joe's Gang
John Quade	Nolan
Jim Davis	Marshall
Jeff Bridges	Jake Rumsey
David Huddleston	Big Joe
John Boyd	Prisoner
Jerry Houser	Arthur Simms
Damon Cofer	Jim Bob Logan
Joshua Hill Lewis	Boog Bookin
Geoffrey Lewis	Hobbs
Raymond Guth	Jackson
Jean Allison	Dixon's Mother
Ned Wertimer	Dixon's Father
Charles Tyner	Egg Farmer
Ted Gehring	Zeb
Claudia Bryar	Mrs. Clum
Monika Henreid	Min
Todd Martin	Sergeant
Barry Brown	Drew Dixon
John Savage	Loney

Technical Credits

Robert Benton

David Newman

Robert Benton	Director,Screenwriter
Audrey Blasdel-Goddard	Set Decoration/Design
Gene S. Cantamessa	Sound Mixer
Robert Gundlach	Art Director
Stanley Jaffe	Producer
Ron Kalish	Editor
Howard W. Koch	Asst. Director
David Newman	Screenwriter
Ralph Rosenblum	Editor
Harvey Schmidt	Score Composer
Anthea Sylbert	Costumes/Costume Designer
Paul Sylbert	Production Designer
Gordon Willis	Cinematographer

Editorial Reviews

Making his assured directorial debut with an intelligently entertaining genre piece, Robert Benton takes a decidedly unsentimental view of the frontier myths of male bonding and opportunity for the Western Bad Company (1972). Set during the Civil War, Benton and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) collaborator David Newman's screenplay subtly evokes the Vietnam era in its focus on two young draft dodgers, pious Barry Brown and larcenous Jeff Bridges. Rather than a place of freedom and opportunity, the West they find is an unglamorous prairie wasteland of petty thieves, physical threats, rough justice, and shifting loyalties. Benton maintains a low-key, thoughtful tone occasionally leavened by bits of humor, while Gordon Willis' expressive, autumnal cinematography and Harvey Schmidt's piano score quietly underline the evolution of Brown's upstanding values as he confronts the West's moral relativity. Though not as well-known as such other contemporary revisionist Westerns as The Wild Bunch (1969) and Little Big Man (1970), Bad Company stands as another engaging elegy to the ultimate American myth.

All Movie Guide - Lucia Bozzola