There Was a Crooked Man

This dud by some pretty heavy hitters is, at best, an interesting response to the Dirty Dozen-Butch Cassidy-style sixties buddy flicks featuring arch criminals with a heart who make more 'special' friendships than Andy Hardy. Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Warren Oates, Hume Cronyn, and Burgess Meredith are the all-star cast of bad guys being bad. The gimmick is they're going to make you cheer for the bad guys, rooting for them to escape from prison and make the best of a bad situation--then pull the rug out from under your feet.

It doesn't work, despite some extended bare-butt shots of Kirk Douglas, a terrific supporting performance from Burgess Meredith as an aging "Missouri Kid," and what may be the first poon-tang joke in cinema history. Fonda gives an absurdly bad performance as a do-gooder warden. He sleepwalks through this one--if Chevy Chase ever decided to take on a serious role the resulting debacle might look something like this.

"There Was a Crooked Man" is interesting to watch only as a stellar example of a failed attempt at modernizing the western. Rather than applying modern theory and assuming a revisionist approach a la other comic westerns such as "Blazing Saddles" or "Johnny Guitar," the writers simply throw in some typically taboo subjects for westerns (eg. nudity, homosexuality) and bask in the glory of their social awareness.

Newman and Benton are better writers than this, and clearly learned from their mistakes with their next partnership, "Bad Company," one of the finest westerns of the last thirty years. By the time of "Bad Company" they have come to the understanding that raising issues takes a little more effort than a simple footnote at the bottom of the page--you have to be willing to ask questions and be daring enough to let the audience come up with the answer.

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