Robert Preston and Steve McQueen as father and
son in director Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner.
America, if not the world,
was in a state of flux in 1972, as the alternative values that had made their
presence unequivocally known in the 1960s began to slowly but surely weave
themselves into the fabric of daily life. At its most superficial and visible
level, this transition was evidenced by the disappearing ears of traditionally
conservative types—then called “squares”—as they became increasingly obscured
by steadily growing hair . . . with previously nonexistent sideburns keeping
pace. On the female side, less was the new more when it came to wearing
makeup, and pants were replacing skirts as the norm as closet feminists began
pushing their own personal envelopes. New was supplanting old at a rapid pace; generations-old Victorian storefronts and other building exteriors were
being hidden like family skeletons behind more simple, modern-looking façades.
Familiar ways of life were receding
into the sunset as well, only on a more permanent basis than fleeting haute couture and temporary, cosmetic
architectural fixes. The landscape was changing, literally and figuratively. It
is this reality that is layed out in the background tableau of Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner, the story of an aging rodeo
champion—played by ’sixties icon Steve McQueen in a quietly inspired
performance—who is dealing with the dissolution of his family as he continues
to age in a young man’s business.
Peckinpah, for all the slow motion
violence and carnage he splashed across the screen in his influential and
lauded The Wild Bunch, for which he
is best remembered today, also had a markedly serene, bucolic side. This
undercurrent of tranquility showed itself in the spiritual high road he took in
Ride the High Country, a sadly
forgotten 1962 masterpiece, and again in the quirky and personal The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). It is
revealed in all its pastoral, pensive glory in Junior Bonner. In this starkly scintillating, reflective film, scripted by Jeb Rosebrook, Peckinpah’s
camera records the world of the American Southwest of the early 1970s in a
strikingly realistic manner, often using local folk from the Prescott, Arizona filming
location as actors, and incorporating an actual Fourth of July parade that took
place during shooting.
Junior’s father, Ace, a
former rodeo champion himself and a local hero in Prescott, is basically a
sixty-something boy who refuses to grow up, drinking in the residual adoration
of the community with the same gusto one imagines he did in his prime. Yet his
world and his family are deteriorating under his nose; his home has been
bulldozed to make way for a trailer park that’s being developed by his other son,
Curly, and he and his wife have long since parted ways, thanks to his cavalier
improprieties through the years. Richly played by Robert Preston with his usual
charming bravado, Ace is for all practical purposes an older version of
Professor Harold Hill, the character he had immortalized ten years earlier in
the film version of The Music Man,
which Peckinpah admired.
Junior’s ostensible Moby
Dick is a bull named Sunshine, a nemesis which earlier—revealed in snippets of
flashback—prevented him from winning a bulldogging competition, and which
appears to be the device that drives the plot forward. Reading between the
lines, one can surmise that Junior sees a successful repeat ride on Sunshine as
a way of maintaining his hometown hero status, as well as staving off the encroaching
end of his rodeo career—and a perhaps inevitable descent into his father’s
irresponsible lifestyle. Yet the denouement occurs almost as a throwaway; Ace
and his estranged wife (Ida Lupino) are enjoying one last hurrah together
before Ace leaves for good for Australia, and Junior’s real estate developer
brother (Joe Don Baker), himself an instrument of change, is off somewhere else
as well. It is in the alternately rapid fire/invisible editing by Frank Santillo and Robert
L. Wolfe that Peckinpah’s theme is
revealed: an America in transition, as old ways and traditions become things of
the past.
