Film Review: Joe Kidd (1972)

By the early 1970s, Hollywood’s Western genre had entered a period of self-reflection, with filmmakers increasingly interrogating the mythic grandeur of the American frontier. The revisionist Western, marked by its grittier narratives and moral ambiguity, sought to dismantle the simplistic heroism of earlier decades. Even veteran directors like John Sturges, whose career had been built on the stoic heroics of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and the ensemble valor of The Magnificent Seven (1960), could not resist this shift. His 1972 film Joe Kidd, however, stands as a curious artifact of this transitional era—a commercially viable but artistically inert effort that failed to leave a lasting imprint on the genre. While the film sporadically engages with the socio-political currents of its time, it ultimately succumbs to the creative compromises of a director in decline and a script torn between ideological conviction and market pragmatism.

The film’s origins lie in the turbulent social landscape of the 1960s and early 1970s, a period defined by civil rights activism, anti-war dissent, and growing skepticism toward institutional authority. Scriptwriter Elmore Leonard, whose literary career would later cement his reputation as a master of crime fiction, initially conceived Joe Kidd as a fictionalized retelling of the 1967 Rio Arriba Courthouse raid in New Mexico. Led by the militant land rights activist Reies Tijerina, this real-life incursion saw Hispanic activists confront the U.S. legal system over disputed Spanish colonial land grants—a cause steeped in postcolonial grievance and Chicano militancy. Leonard’s original vision, infused with left-wing solidarity for marginalized communities, positioned the film within the broader revisionist tradition of works like The Wild Bunch (1969) and Little Big Man (1970), which critiqued American imperialism through the lens of the Western. Yet by the time production commenced, the script underwent significant alterations, transposing the narrative to 1902 and substituting Tijerina with the fictional Luis Chama (John Saxon). This sanitisation—likely a response to Hollywood’s nervousness around overt political radicalism—diluted the story’s incisive critique, leaving a narrative that gestured toward progressive themes without fully committing to their implications.

The plot centers on Joe Kidd (Clint Eastwood), a disgraced former bounty hunter languishing in a New Mexico jail cell for drunken brawling. His reluctant entanglement with Chama’s cause begins when the Mexican-American activist stages a dramatic raid on a courthouse, demanding recognition of ancestral land rights. Kidd, initially indifferent to the plight of the oppressed locals, is soon drawn into the conflict after accepting a lucrative offer from Frank Harlan (Robert Duvall), a ruthless Anglo landowner intent on eliminating Chama. Harlan’s Machiavellian maneuvering—culminating in the taking inhabitants of Chama’s village hostages and Kidd’s abrupt dismissal—forces the antihero into an uneasy alliance with the very people he was hired to undermine. Yet even as Kidd turns against Harlan, the film resists lionizing Chama, portraying his methods as reckless and his charisma as self-serving. This moral ambivalence, while thematically rich in theory, is undercut by a script that struggles to reconcile its sympathetic portrayal of Chicano resistance with the commercial imperatives of positioning Eastwood’s laconic drifter as the film’s moral compass.

Visually, Joe Kidd benefits from the stark beauty of its Arizona locations, with cinematographer Bruce Surtees capturing the sun-scorched deserts and crumbling adobe villages with a documentary-like precision that evokes the genre’s golden age. Action sequences, particularly a mid-film depiction of Kidd ingeniously dispatches a henchman played by Don Stroud, showcase Sturges’ knack for spatial clarity and tension. Yet these moments of ingenuity are undercut by tonal missteps, most notably the absurdly staged climax in which a locomotive is deployed as a makeshift battering ram. The scene’s laughable impracticality—a literal trainwreck of narrative logic—epitomizes the film’s broader failures to balance its revisionist aspirations with the visceral thrills expected of a Western.

At the heart of the film’s unevenness lies a fundamental tension between Leonard’s original script and the compromises demanded by studio oversight. The character of Luis Chama, intended as a revolutionary martyr in the mold of Che Guevara, is rendered inert by a script that refuses to grant him the dignity of a coherent ideological stance. John Saxon, though charismatic, is hamstrung by dialogue that oscillates between noble defiance and petty vindictiveness, leaving Chama’s motives frustratingly opaque. Similarly, Eastwood’s performance—restrained to the point of detachment—feels at odds with the film’s attempts to frame him as a reluctant moral arbiter. His occasional flashes of dry wit and steely resolve are insufficient to anchor a protagonist whose motivations shift without psychological grounding.

Sturges, reportedly battling severe alcoholism during production, directs with a workmanlike efficiency that keeps the film’s 94-minute runtime brisk but shallow. Subplots, such as Harlan’s fraught relationship with his “kept woman” (Lynne Marta), are introduced and abandoned without resolution, their narrative threads left dangling like the unfinished themes of a disinterested composer. Yet this brevity arguably serves the film’s defense: in an era when bloated epics often succumbed to self-indulgence, Joe Kidd’s economy of form ensures it never outstays its welcome.

Commercially, the film proved a modest success, grossing over $7 million against a $2.5 million budget—a testament to Eastwood’s box-office clout in the immediate aftermath of the Dirty Harry (1971) phenomenon. Yet its critical reception was muted, with many noting the dissonance between its political aspirations and narrative indecisiveness. For Eastwood, Joe Kidd marked the end of his tenure as a Western lead in films he did not direct. His subsequent turn behind the camera with The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)—a more assured and thematically resonant revisionist Western—suggested that the actor’s instincts were sharper when he controlled the creative reins.

In hindsight, Joe Kidd occupies an awkward niche in cinematic history: a film that sought to engage with the radical politics of its time but flinched from the consequences of doing so unambiguously. Its technical merits—aesthetically grounded in the dying days of studio-era craftsmanship—cannot fully compensate for the ideological timidity that neutered its source material. For Sturges, it represents the beginning of a creative twilight; for Eastwood, a stepping stone toward auteurist maturity; for Leonard, a frustrating early example of Hollywood’s reluctance to embrace radical narratives.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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