DVD Review: Sam Peckinpah’s “Junior Bonner” with Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen’s iconic presence in the title role, Sam Peckinpah’s direction, a supporting cast that includes Ida Lupino, Robert Preston, Joe Don Baker, and is peppered with western movie stalwarts from Ben Johnson to Dub Taylor and Don “Red” Barry. All of these combine to add impact to “Junior Bonner,” one of the films that defines why the 1970s was perhaps the last consistently great decade in American cinema. The film has been released on blu ray by Kino Lorber.

Junior Bonner is a rodeo competitor whose focus is to maintain the ability to remain on a bucking bronco for enough seconds to win the event. But now he is past 40, broken and battered, and being told by others that his time is up. When he returns to the home he left years before to compete once again, he catches up with the family from whom he’d been estranged. His dreamer father whose big ideas never materialized into anything, his ambitious brother who plans to tear down the family home and build a trailer park, and his forlorn mother whose struggles to accept all of the conflicts, including the father’s womanizing, has left her bitter. This is a great deal for Junior to take in and sort out.

For Peckinpah, this is his most sedate, introspective film since “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970). He was better known for the more violent “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and “Straw Dogs” (1971). In fact, “Junior Bonner” was a box office flop, causing Peckinpah to remark, “I made a movie where nobody got shot and nobody went to see it.” Sadly, the ad campaign sold it as a typical action film as expected from the director and star, so critical reaction was mixed and the box office reflected that reaction. However, in the wake of the iconic status McQueen has since achieved, and looking at the film as cinema without connecting it to a particular style or era, “Junior Bonner” is, in fact, representative as among Peckinpah’s work and features one of McQueen’s finest performances.

There are many subtle delights throughout the film. The way Peckinpah frames the long shot of Bonner walking up to the old homestead for the first time, sidling past the for sale sign put up by his brother, and reconnecting with his mother, is one of the most beautifully shot scenes in the film (credit to veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard for connecting so well with the director’s vision). Ida Lupino expertly plays the mother’s tempered happiness at the return of her roaming boy, while their initial embrace being shot from the back and overhead, surrounding them with negative space, adds even greater poignancy.

Robert Preston’s uninhibited performance as the father – with his yee-haw cowboy gusto crowding a suppressed confusion and brooding – is another factor the enhances the overall narrative. When he’s asked by an old friend how he’s doing, and his response is “better than I deserve” – and when he’s asked by two young women if he’s Junior’s father and he answers, “I used to be” – it is delivered as flippant but understood as introspective.

Joe Don Baker positively explodes from the screen as the ambitious brother, whose focus on capitalist expansion and progress with no interest in tradition. When he loftily claims he is going to “whoop” his “brother’s ass” in the rodeo, Junior replies, “Well somebody is, and it won’t be the first time.”

“Junior Bonner” is an exceptional film that continues to resonate 45 years after its initial release. It is most highly recommended at all levels, not only for libraries and research centers, but for even the most casual fan of good solid filmmaking.

The blu ray is available here.