Kid Blue

Lee Purcell and Dennis Hopper in Kid Blue

James Frawley's Kid Blue is a counterculture Western of unexpected charm and originality. The screenplay was written by Bud Shrake who also penned oaters JW Coop and Tom Horn, but was primarily known as a sports writer. Dennis Hopper plays the Kid, an outlaw bent on taking up a new leaf. He settles in Dimebox, a plains town dominated by a giant ceramics factory which produces ashtrays and other tchotchkes. He is befriended by Reese Ford (Warren Oates), an employee at the factory and his wife, Molly (played by the finger bitingly beautiful Lee Purcell) who both make plain to the Kid that they wish to dally with him. Oates' character even extols the virtues of masculine love in ancient Greece to the baffled Kid, something I don't recall seeing in any Western; even Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys. The Kid tries to stay on the straight and narrow, but a series of humiliatingly menial and repetitive jobs grind him down. He is dogged every step of the way by a venal sheriff played by Ben Johnson, here more the degenerate of The Wild Bunch than the resolute hero he played for John Ford. Johnson's Sheriff obviously believes that the only good hippie is a dead hippie.

The tone of Kid Blue is mildly comic throughout. The Kid is introduced botching a train robbery and each job he attempts afterwards illuminates his ineptitude. Hopper was in his mid-thirties at the time of the shoot, but Frawley helps brings out his boyish vulnerability. The Kid is catnip to the ladies of the film and Oates' character, too. The Kid eventually seeks out the only folks lower than himself on Dimebox's totem pole, a trio of natives, to help him rob the factory. A mad preacher played by Peter Boyle provides the Kid a Deus ex Machina.

This is a resolutely nice and appealing film even when violence, rancid capitalism, racism, adultery and drug abuse poke into the narrative. The hero is not a masculine protector of the frontier, but an androgynous (blue) boy who seems too fragile for the world. While the film rejects traditional values found in Westerns, it is still in a dialogue with its cultural past. Hopper even assumes a traditional heroic pose for the final shot.  The look of the film is not all that different from that of a Andrew V. McLaglen film. The walking and talking tracking shots of Hopper and Oates convey the loose limbed and affable nature of the film. It is a good not great movie, but the cast alone makes it an amiable hang: Janis Rule, M. Emmet Walsh, Ralph Waite, Clifton James, Mary Jackson. Oates and Boyle are at their most low-key and affable. This was the final film for Jose Torvay, best known in the US for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Bandido!, but a veteran of well over 100 films in Mexico. Kid Blue provides him a wonderful send-off with a memorable death scene. 

The film was shot in 1971, but not released until 1973. It was not a wide release, but a burial. Andrew Sarris and Philip French had nice things to say about Kid Blue at the time, but it had fallen into oblivion and been hard to find until its 2015 DVD release. I would recommend it to fans of 70s Westerns. It would make a great double bill with such Hippie Westerns as Bad Company, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Jeremiah Johnson and, especially, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.