Wild Rovers

Arguably one of Blake Edwards' best films, this is a faintly derivative but highly enjoyable Western in the nostalgic, anti-heroic mould. Holden and O'Neal are the innocents tired of their unremarkable lives who team up for a bank robbery, and head off on a picaresque odyssey to Mexico with dreams of amounting to something as cattle barons. If most of the film is gently comic and lyrical, the harshness of the West is never played down, so that the duo's cruel destiny is foreshadowed throughout. Marvellous performances and elegiac photography (by Philip Lathrop) are well complemented by Edwards' unusually light touch.