Goin' South

Nicholson's second film as director, a wonderfully beguiling Western in which he plays a sad sack outlaw (ex-cook to Quantrill's Raiders) snatched from the gallows by Steenburgen's prim spinster (taking advantage of a special ordinance occasioned by man shortage after the Civil War), who weds him and puts him to work mining for gold. Tender, bawdy and funny in its shaggy dog ramifications, their evolving relationship - she hankering for prosperous propriety in Philadelphia, he for lazy lustfulness in a Mexican cantina - is irresistible, and comes complete with a hilarious variation on the genre's inescapable shootout with the law.