The Missouri Breaks (1976)

Starring: Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Harry Dean Stanton, Randy Quaid, and Frederic Forrest
Grade: C-

With Marlon Brando four years removed from The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, and Jack Nicholson fresh off of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Missouri Breaks was expected to be an earth-shattering western involving two of the biggest actors of all time. This should’ve been the stuff of legends!

Well, I can tell you with a straight face that this was not the case at all.

Summary

Land baron David Braxton (John McLiam) rides with his ramrod Pete Marker (Richard Bradford), escorting rustler Sandy Chase (Hunter von Leer) to an area outside of town to be hung. Little Tod (Quaid) is there to watch it unfold. After it happens, Braxton’s daughter Jane (Kathleen Lloyd) is disgusted and leaves as everyone else stares. Back at the Braxton home, an unsettled Jane argues with her father over his violent solutions to the horse rustling problem, but he is adamant over his no tolerance policy and refuses to hear her out.

At the breaks of the Missouri River in Montana, rustler Tom Logan (Nicholson) brings in the last of the horses he stole back to his gang at some small ranch. As Logan talks with Little Tod, Calvin (Stanton), Cary (Forrest) and Si (John Ryan) about everything, he realizes that Sandy, the last member of their group, is dead. Cary tells Tom that Pete Marker was the one that hung him. After this, they all argue on what to do next, landing on Little Tod’s suggestion of robbing a train. The next day, they go through with it, with Tom hijacking the train and holding up the guy watching the money at gunpoint. After forcing the guy to take out the pin to separate this car from the rest of the train, he collects the money. When Tom opens the door to leave, he is surprised to find that the train stopped right over a bridge, and he almost falls to his death. He drops a lot of money off of the bridge during this shock. Thankfully, Tod is there to pick it up off the ground as he is waiting for him on ground level. Though this whole thing seems to be botched, they manage to escape with a lot of the money before the rest of the train came back after them. In town, Tom and Todd go to watch David Braxton oversee a trial of some criminal that will be going to jail. The criminal is oddly cooperative and makes this speech that he intends on inspiring with but comes off as an absolute joke to the citizens watching. As they laugh at him, they laugh even harder when he asks them to refer to him from now on as, “The Lonesome Kid”. Afterwards, Tom approaches David under the guise of friendship, asking for advice because he wants to buy a small ranch in town. David is friendly as they discuss his rustling problems and Tom even asks about Sandy, lying and acting like he agreed with David’s decision to hang this “stranger”.

Jane, who was walking with the two, is bothered by the discussion of the hanging and argues with Tom before leaving with David. Later, David and Jane find the body of Pete Marker hung, as Tom’s gang officially gets their revenge. Immediately after, Tom buys the ranch and the group all head to a whorehouse to celebrate.

Sometime later, the group works on the ranch and helps build up the house. Afterwards, Calvin and Tom discuss their new plan. The group wants to go across the Missouri River and into Canada to steal a bunch of horses from the Mounties but if they go, one of them will have to stay and watch the ranch. Since Tom got to go on the train robbery last time, Calvin refuses to be the one that stays behind. So, Tom decides to bite the bullet and accept the fact that he has to be the guy. At Pete Marker’s funeral, regulator and all-around oddball Robert E. Lee Clayton (Brando) shows up. He was hired by David Braxton to take care of the rustlers that inhabit the area. Clayton makes his presence known as soon as he shows up at the funeral too. He starts berating the group there for indirectly causing Marker’s death. He can’t believe they didn’t investigate the rustling problem further by interrogating Sandy more before they killed him. He even picks up Marker’s lifeless body out of the casket by his chest as an exclamation point. Soon after Tom’s gang starts their trek to Canada, Jane rides by and greets Tom in a neighborly way after finding out he bought the ranch. Since he has time and wants to flirt, he takes his horse and joins Jane for a quick hangout session. After some initial conversation, she calls Tom out on him wanting to have sex with her. She seems to be down, but it’s so “out of nowhere” that Tom is put off by it. As a result, he spurns her advances in the meanest way possible.

As weird as this all was, this is the moment that ignites the blossoming relationship between the two.

Now, Tom is becoming more and more entrenched in this ranch and this area, as he continues to pretend that he’s a strait-laced guy. Sadly, he won’t be able to get too comfortable because he later meets Lee Clayton, and he can tell something is off with Tom.

My Thoughts

I really wanted to like The Missouri Breaks. It’s a western, it’s centered around a battle between Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, and it’s got this promise of surefire violence. I even love the poster. Unfortunately, it didn’t even sniff the expectations I had. This movie was all over the place.

For starters, this was a revenge thriller at its core, but the first half has this oddly placed humor and whimsical music attached to it. It felt weird even in context because we know what movie we’re watching and what it’s about. Once the film is over, these scenes stand out as even dumber than they did when you’re watching it. It doesn’t fit the tone of the movie at all. Apart from this, there was so much fluff that not only had nothing to do with the main story but also didn’t advance the plot in any way, feeling like a pit stop keeping us from the stuff we want to see. Think about the scene with “The Lonesome Kid”. What the hell did that accomplish? Was it just to show how this town has weird inhabitants? I understand that we need to establish David Braxton as the leader of this town, but we already got that from the opening. Plus, even in that scene with “The Lonesome Kid”, Braxton didn’t look like the evil leader we think he is or want him to be. The whole thing is played for humor, with everyone in the room laughing at the criminal including Tom and Little Tod. This character had no influence on the story and was only there for that sole scene, so what did we really get out of wasting this much time?

There are so many instances where we get these scenes that detour us from the main plot. It felt like director Arthur Penn had this idea that a film can’t be good unless it’s at least two hours long. As a result, he stretched everything out as long as possible. Speaking of which, the elongated whorehouse scene is a perfect example of something being unneeded. We get the point they want to celebrate with a bunch of whores. We don’t need to see the entire process of the group getting there, choosing the girls and leaving, without the sex part I might add! Yes, Jane brings up to Tom later how she knows he went to a whorehouse because she’s friends with the blonde he chose but couldn’t this still have been established without the whorehouse sequence that wasted so much time to accomplish nothing? The room was so fucking dark you could barely see who the boys picked out anyway. Next, you have all the meaningless banter between Tom and his friends that goes absolutely nowhere. It doesn’t endear us to the group at all. It’s just another timewaster.

The side story of Tom and Jane’s love didn’t make sense either. I understand how they have an attraction to each other based on looks. Besides this however, nothing in this relationship or how they truly start to like each other makes a shred of sense! Following their initial argument when they were introduced to each other, she randomly comes by Tom’s ranch to greet him, and they ride horses together. As I state in the summary, out of fucking nowhere, Jane calls him out for wanting to have sex, so she calls his bluff and basically says, “Let’s do it right here”. At first, I thought she was calling his bluff in a sort of you-talk-a-big-game-but-can’t-handle-me sort of way because Tom is freaked out by her forwardness and backs off, calling her a bitch. However, then she starts crying because he turned her down. So, wait, she actually was down to fuck him right then and there? Why? What did he do right in this situation where she was so down? I understand women can be complicated, but this is completely illogical, right? If this scene was written to showcase that point, then they couldn’t have done a worse job. Towards the end of this scene, to pile on to the “logic” we are witnessing, Tom asks her for a kiss, and she has the audacity to say, “No, I hardly know you”. Am I missing something here? Did she not ask immediately before this to have sex? What the hell is going on with this girl? I thought, maybe she’s hysterical and comes from a bad home life because David is such a dick, but there’s no example of this behavior in any part of the rest of the movie to show us she’s mildly crazy.

This scene is a one-and-done, and her responses are never addressed any further. This character is written poorly, plain and simple. Their romance isn’t attractive to the audience at all by this point. It felt like more of an obstacle to overcome as a viewer.

It took me away from the stuff that I wanted to see and that’s Tom Logan versus Robert E. Lee Clayton.

All of the scenes including these two iconic actors were golden. It left me wanting more and more each time. Admittedly, they tease us a bit too much because I felt like they should’ve had more scenes together, but the fact we got to see it was worth the viewing alone. The bathtub scene was intense as hell and highly memorable, as was the second meeting between Clayton and Tom at Tom’s ranch. This was where Clayton demonstrates his shooting ability, giving Tom a scare while implying he knows Tom isn’t a farmer. The understated aggressiveness of this scene, as well as the outright ferocity of the bathtub scene shows how different the two characters are, along with their approaches to getting what they want done.

For these two stars alone, The Missouri Breaks is really cool to look back on as a movie fan.

Then again, the real positive coming out of this film was Brando’s take on Lee Clayton. Apparently in real life, Brando basically took the character in a completely different direction than what was written because of his improvising, essentially recreating the villain in his own image. Because of this, Brando’s Clayton is a totally unpredictable enigma. Starting from one of the oddest introductory scenes you’ll ever see for a bad guy in a western film, Brando takes over the movie with his character’s bizarre personality. He’s so entertaining to watch interact with the good guys (and anyone at all really), that he blows John McLiam’s David Braxton out of the water. As we see Clayton bird watch, laughing on his horse for no reason, killing a rabbit with a weapon he created, and putting insects into the mouth of Little Tod, it only reminds us how one-dimensional a villain David Braxton is. David is an asshole land baron. That’s it. This is what his character is from the beginning of the film to the end. There’s a lot of layers and intricate details to Clayton though, and we want to learn more about him because of what Brando brought to the character, but David Braxton is so cut-and-dry that we don’t care about his background whatsoever. We just want Jack Nicholson to shoot him. The only other thing we know about him is that he’s a bad father. They try to make him seem like a big deal with Little Tod saying he looked like “God” during Sandy’s hanging, but he really just looked like Burgess Meredith.

When you describe someone as “looking like God”, they need to be an unforgettable, powerful, larger-than-life figure. I didn’t get that out of David Braxton, especially once Lee Clayton walks into the film and takes it over.

The reason to watch The Missouri Breaks is the unhinged and unpredictable Marlon Brando making things up as he goes along. He’s a walking question mark, even weirding out the man who hired him. Though Brando’s unprofessionalism as an actor is well documented, I don’t think he gets enough credit for how well he pulls off this Clayton character. On top of being a peculiar guy, he understands the evil traits he needs to have as the main villain. When he makes his abrupt switch to viciousness following his soft rambling, Brando is able to turn it on like the flip of a switch. It really wakes you up after so many boring, dragged-out scenes happening during the course of this film. He has a tinge of insanity in his personality. Every scene he’s in, he grabs your attention. He’s so evil he even pisses off the villain in Braxton to the point that he’s fired. That’s when you know you’re a bad dude! He’s completely uncontrollable, even saying he doesn’t care if he’s paid or not because he intends on finishing the job, despite his firing. Though we’re not entirely sure what Clayton’s motivation is at that point because he’s not the vengeful type, if the intention is to show us that a motivated madman is on the loose, then they succeeded.

I didn’t understand the constant reminder of Tom Logan nor Lee Clayton carrying a pistol though. Considering the “business” Tom is in, it doesn’t make sense for him to not carry one. Clayton shoots from a distance with a long-range gun, so that does make sense. However, the first time he shows off his weapon to Tom, it’s a fucking pistol. He swears he never uses it but then uses it several times in front of him. This is confusing but acceptable because Clayton is who he is. In Tom’s case though, the only reason this character detail existed was for the sole moment that Tom goes to the Braxton home to hunt Clayton with his pistol, showing how much he means business. Honestly, I am okay with this because it did bring a heightened energy to the scene. When Nicholson yells, you stand up straight, hoping for him to finally pounce. It does do the job there. However, the reason I bring this whole thing up is because there’s a scene where Tom goes to steal Woodruff’s horses and tells the man to give up his gun to him, even though Tom doesn’t have a gun to threaten him with. How do you do a stick-up without a gun? Nicholson isn’t nearly as intimidating as he thinks he is, so why is the only guy in the situation with a gun, willing to hand it over to him? This was outrageous to say the least.

Along with this, there’s an argument Tom and Calvin have about who gets to go on the Canada trip. Why is this? They both acknowledge they’re scared of the Mounties and what could possibly happen, but they both want to be a part of the trip. Why would they? This shit is dangerous and one of their best friends just died because of their exploits! They should be arguing on who gets to stay and relax, while the loser has to go on the trip that will take several weeks to pull off and might result in their death!

Once again, the “logic” comes to play in The Missouri Breaks, and it completely takes me away from the narrative. In their defense though, it was pretty funny to watch Nicholson flip out over the decision.

I enjoyed certain aspects of The Missouri Breaks. Some elements were handled very well, but there were so many other head-scratching decisions, unimportant characters, unnecessary dialogue and scenes, and time-wasting moments that I walked out of this feeling frustrated. Even the promised violence between our two leads wasn’t what it should’ve been. When the final death scene happens, it’s all closeups of their faces. It does add emotion to the scene, but they never square up with each other, nor involve themselves in a shootout. It just added to my frustration, especially because Brando’s villain was so good that I wanted him to be engaged more in the action. If anything, it would make me like Tom Logan as a hero even more. After Clayton is done with, I completely forgot about David Braxton, but Tom looking for his vengeance reminds us that David is technically the more important villain driving the plot. The problem was that I lost interest at that point because David was never treated as seriously as the secondary villain. If I’m checked out before the climax, that’s an issue. To end everything with a final conversation between Jane and Tom was another slap in the face because their romance meant absolutely nothing to me.

So, for every memorable “unpredictable Clayton” scene like him putting a carrot in his mouth so his horse would eat it until they kissed, you get something supremely boring or flat-out stupid to bring you right back down. The Missouri Breaks has a few moments where it shines, and it’s because of our leads and their scenes together. Sadly, these moments are few and far between to save the movie.

Fun Fact: Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton were being looked at to star before it was realized that getting the two biggest actors ever was a possibility. Susan Sarandon auditioned for the role of Jane Braxton too.