Junior Bonner

Peckinpah coasting enjoyably between Straw Dogs and The Getaway with an elegiac reworking of Nick Ray's The Lusty Men, an alternately wistful and raucous family Western about the shrinking frontiers of the rodeo circuit and the anachronism of honour (a suited middle-class horseman rides by with The Wild Bunch embroidered on his saddle-blanket). Some of the symbolism's a bit heavy-handed (wild bulls: bulldozers), but the performances are finely affecting, and Peckinpah captures the contradictory flavours of the new west with a multi-camera set-up at the real Prescott, Arizona rodeo and judicious use of split screen.