The New Hollywood movement of the late 1960s and 1970s gave talented young writers and directors to work unexpected variations on the medium's most tried-and-true genres. Just about every week brought something new and confounding to the nation's movie theaters (provided you lived in a big-ish city). As this cultural revolution raged throughout the tumultuous 1970s, the old guard of movie stars found themselves being replaced by the likes of Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, and the late Robert Redford.
One actor who appeared destined for major movie stardom was Jeff Bridges; he possessed high-wattage sex appeal as Duane in Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show," but the co-captain of his lousy high school football team is a deeply vulnerable young man with questionable prospects. There's something off about Duane, and this strange quality would apply to enliven most of Bridges' best performances.
Fresh off "The Last Picture Show," Bridges gave two of his finest performances in 1972. One was in John Huston's "Fat City," where he shone as Ernie Munger, a promising young boxer who, it's quickly clear, isn't going to pan out. The other arrived in "Bad Company," the directorial debut of Robert Benton (co-writer of "Bonnie and Clyde" and director of "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Nobody's Fool"), where he challenged our sympathies as an opportunistic, incompetent young Western outlaw named Jake Rumsey. They're both rough, well-crafted gems, but "Fat City" is practically a canonical New Hollywood masterpiece by now. "Bad Company" doesn't get quite the same degree of respect (though Roger Ebert was an early admirer). Why has a revisionist Western still been considered a minor work?