Directed by Clint Eastwood
Bronco Billy is a 1980 American Western film directed by Clint Eastwood, who also stars in the lead role. The film follows the story of Bronco Billy McCoy, a struggling Wild West show owner who, along with his ragtag group of performers, travels across the country performing shows.
The film was met with mixed reviews upon its release. Some critics praised Eastwood’s performance and the heartwarming story, while others criticized the film for being too simplistic and lacking depth. However, over the years, Bronco Billy has gained a cult following and is now regarded as a classic Western film.
In interviews, Eastwood has expressed his own fondness for the film, calling it one of his personal favorites. He has also explained that the film was a tribute to the Western genre and the cowboy way of life, which he felt was fading away in modern times.
Overall, Bronco Billy is a charming and heartfelt film that has stood the test of time and remains a beloved classic in the Western genre.
I was both delighted, unsurprised and blown away to find that this was Clint’s own personal favorite. To me, this is a perfect film- every facet of Americana loaded into a smorgasbordal mess that sticks together like hunter’s glue and shows Clint on all-cylinders but without any bleaknss, sadness or devistation; yes, it is a sad film about a sad world. It’s about a dying Cowboys & Indians tent show with a bunch of money owed both ways and dwindling, generally mute audiences (Clint is perhaps the best “silence” director there is, truly – check out the almost total lack of music in Cry Macho until he gets Back on His Horse).
It’s about crummy, old-hat acts, scared girls who ran away from home to literally Join the Circus, and it’s about kids, and a genuinely humbling motif of doing it for the Lil’ Pards (as Clint calls them); at one point, he talks about getting more urban youth bussed to the sticks to see what “real Cowboys and Indians are like,” and it isn’t even the most delusional and misguided thing Ol’ Bill does throughout. He is never a schemer, a liar or a jerk. But when you run the Big Show, when it’s your job to find men in every city to pound steel into the ground to erect the Big Tent for the Big Show, and then to be the Star of the Big Show… there simply must be an whole Little Black Book in his back pocket of faces to avoid, families even, and then entire cities, yet…
Bronco Billy is a saint. He truly cares about the Lil’ Pards in every town, and when he meets a group of youngsters out on the edge of town looking Poor and Bored, Billy stands right in front of the sun, pops off a few rounds at some old tin cans and gives every Pard two tickets, one for them and one for a parent, who he constantly says “they should always be listened to” at every chance he can find to pass on wisdom. His main problem is that he hasn’t paid his performers and feeds them cheap junk and isn’t doing his part as a leader to get them through “another one of those hard times” as a terrific Scatman Crothers says asking – for some extra scratch just to get some new shoes, or something.
Scatman speaks on behalf of the rest of the performers, who mess up often, have a high turnover rate with certain acts and is generally treated like a Big Tent Performer would should have probably considered back then before signing a contract. But at the end of the day, there is a family – it is intact, they are celebratory, there is music in the air and the woman pretending to be a Native American reveals she is pregnant to a joyous Billy, who fires two shots in the air right in the tent and talks about all the things they’ll have to do for the “little pard” and how exciting it is to see a baby for once in this dying replica of nothing, repeated ad nauseam to dwindling crowds and the pull of Americana in a time when it wasn’t very relevant to be patriotic and various arms of the American government were involved in some of their most infamous, formative disasters yet.
Watching Billy Bronco for the twenty-seventh or so time recently I asked myself, Do we ever see a single newspaper in this entire film? Is there a TV? Are they just totally detached from not just the current day, but the entire century plus some change and a funhouse mirror? Is this a beautiful life to life? How could I ever say it isn’t?
Bronco Billy is my new favorite film – the very best I have ever seen, I think. This may change, but as I compulsively rewatch it over and over I just find it ever so much more tighter, and purposeful, and from the heart – I see why it is Clint’s personal favorite