My choice of film is usually fairly arbitrary and often depends upon what TCM or Film Four have scheduled or which of my high-priority LoveFilm selections arrives next. In choosing Nevada Smith, though, I was swayed by one factor alone: Steve McQueen. He is my favourite actor. I love the way he never seems to be acting.
I didn't approach Nevada Smith much in the way of expectation. It hasn't amassed much of a reputation over the years, I don't know much of the director Henry Hathaway's work- aside from True Grit- and I really don't like the work of Harold Robbins on whose novel this is based. All this film really had going for it was its cast. And the fact that it might help me tidy up my tag cloud.
It's better than I expected, but not by much. The storyline follows a familiar pattern- Steve McQueen stars as a half-Caucasian/half-native American teenager (despite McQueen being a blond 36 year old at the time) who sees his parents killed in cold blood by three men and vows to track them down and avenge the deaths. The movie is episodic: he kills the first man (Martin Landau) in a knife fight, learns that the second (Arthur Kennedy) is in a Louisiana prison and gets sentenced himself just to kill him and then escape, and finally he hunts down the ever-reliable Karl Malden for the film's climactic scene.
Along the way he is taught how to fight and shoot and drink and play cards by a gun salesman he tries and fails to hold up (played by an impressive Brian Keith) and he encounters a couple of love interests and a priest (played by an unconvincing Raf Vallone, he was much better as the lead Mafioso in The Italian Job) and with each of them he uses them and then turns his back on them with no further thought for them. That is the interesting part of the film and is explored as fully as the genre allowed at that point. Meanwhile Sergio Leone was breaking down such considerations with the contemporaneous masterpiece 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' and in that context Nevada Smith is exposed as a formulaic genre picture.
It is just a standard western if, I suppose, a little more ambitious than most. And content to exist within the confines of genre expectations when the opportunity to examine the emptiness of revenge or the brutalisation of man as a means to overcome brutality was there. And for that wasted opportunity, 5/10.
