Robert Benton’s first directorial effort, Bad Company, from 1972, is a bad film and a bad Western, too.  It’s one of those revisionist oaters from the 70s which takes delight in deconstructing the myth of the frontier, showing it as a sordid and depressing place.

It concerns a gang of young men who light out for the territory during the Civil War, to find fame and fortune and/or evade getting drafted into the Union army.  It takes forever to get them moving west, in a long prelude to the actual adventure which mostly involves their cute antics as petty thieves.

It proceeds thereafter in a series of vignettes — robbing farmyards, getting robbed by bandits.  Some of these episodes are involving, some repetitive.  There’s one really well done scene involving a running shootout in a forest filled with leafless trees.

The dialogue feels synthetic throughout, modeled inexpertly on the vernacular style of Mark Twain.

By the end, the two main protagonists have graduated from a life of petty thievery to a life of armed robbery.  So much for the American Dream.  So much for the sodbusters who turned the desolate plains into a breadbasket for the world.

The film’s one shining virtue is its cinematography, by the late Gordon Willis, who conveys a vision of the plains that is both beautiful and forbidding.  It’s the only real reason to watch the film but, Gordon Willis being Gordon Willis, it’s reason enough.