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The least of Richard Brooks’s Westerns
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In one way this is a typical end-of-the-West tale because it’s set in 1905 and there’s a motor-cycle showing how out-of date horses are. In fact, though, the characters are all classic Old West types and apart from the motorbike there’s no sign that the Wild West is disappearing. The characters don’t seem to be aware that they are anachronisms. All the scenery is the wild and unspoiled West.
Richard Brooks (1912 – 1992) was an auteury kind of director who won an Oscar for Elmer Gantry. He helmed three Westerns. The first two were rather good: The Last Hunt in 1956 with Stewart Granger and Robert Taylor, and The Professionals in 1966 with Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, among others. They had classic Western credentials with something interesting to say as well. Bite the Bullet had certain qualities but is certainly not the equal of the first two.
It’s the story of a cross-country endurance horse race sponsored by a newspaper. There were in fact several such races. The most famous was in 1908, sponsored by the Denver Post, which put up $2,500 in prize money to the winner of a race from Wyoming to Colorado over a distance of 700 miles. Brooks clearly took this event as inspiration for Bite the Bullet. However, we are never told from where to where the movie race goes. I guess it’s supposed to be symbolic, man.
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Horse-lover Hackman
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The contestants have the slight air of mail-order characters for there is a horse-loving ex-Rough Rider (Gene Hackman), a drifting gambler (James Coburn), an old-time former Pony Express Rider who wants one crack at glory before cashing in (Ben Johnson), and naturally there has to be the inevitable posh Englishman (Ian Bannen), semi-feminist woman (Candice Bergen), noble Mexican (Mario Arteaga) and brash kid (Jan-Michael Vincent). Central casting could have done this job blindfold.
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Old-timer Ben
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Another problem with race movies is that they risk being staccato, episodic affairs as far as pacing is concerned and sometimes quite contrived plotting has to be adopted to prevent a slow and inexorable rhythm to the picture. Horses going 700 miles and stopping every night can only go so fast and can only be so interesting. There can only be so many plausible occurrences.
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Feisty femme Candice
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Still, the actors are by and large good and visually the movie is very attractive. It was photographed by Harry Stradling Jr, who knew something about Westerns, and the Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico locations were superb.
We cheer Gene (it was to have been Charles Bronson but he turned it down) when he beats up the kid because we have loved abusers of horses getting a taste of their own medicine ever since The Virginian took on Balaam for cruelly mistreating the sweet horse Pedro. Of course the kid learns the error of his ways from the wily old cowboys and reforms. The opening scene shows Hackman being nice to a foal – standard Western semiotics: anyone seen early in a movie being nice to young animal or young human is going to be the goody while anyone seen beating either is set up to be the film’s villain.
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Coburn aims to win
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Coburn is damned tough and gritty. Ben is suitably old and beat-up but it’s Ben Johnson so of course we are on his side. Candice is actually quite good as the whore with crook husband who turns out to have an ulterior motive for entering the race. Bannen did posh Brits in the West as a bit of a sideline (see The Deserter). He’s OK, I guess. He is handed a mere derringer with which to shoot his crippled horse and does this with a shaking hand from several yards away. I fear that animal may have suffered.
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You don’t really want to shoot a horse from several yards away with a derringer
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J-M Vincent is OK as the youth. This movie was released on a double bill with another Vincent picture.
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Vincent as wild kid who reforms
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Bite the Bullet was nominated for two Academy Awards and won the 1976 Western Heritage Bronze Wrangler Award for best Theatrical Motion Picture. Not sure that I would have gone that far.
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5 Responses
I purchased this film on DVD mainly because it features James Coburn and Ben Johnson, and those two western stalwarts certainly do not disappoint. Beyond those two luminaries, Bite the Bullet is a technically good film. The script is very good, the plot more than serviceable and the cinematography quite excellent. This should have been a good and very enjoyable film. Alas, it is anything but. On the contrary, it is deeply unpleasant.
What is so vile about this picture is its gross maltreatment of horses. Were the horses actually harmed, or did the crew use legerdemain to make it look like they were harmed? I hope the latter, but honestly do not know. What I’m certain of is that we see one small horse punched in the head, another shot, and still another ridden to death, with the action described in very slow motion. These are hideous scenes, with the last being especially despicable. Moreover, the chief malefactor, the sadistic punk Carbo played by Jan Michael Vincent, rather than receive comeuppance for his horrendous abuse of horses, is given redemption and a hero’s valedictory. The implausibility of Carbo’s sudden transfiguration is exceeded only by the loathesomeness of the screenwriters’ writing of it.
As salt for the wounds, the viewer is also bombarded by Alex North’s overwrought, bombastic score, and plenty of John Philip Sousa music.
In conclusion, whatever the film’s merits, this is one picture I’ll never watch again. Two hours of repellent horse abuse is not my idea of a good time.
For once, the treatment of the horses is very realistic. I can understand it can make you uncomfortable though…
Richard Books has stated that not a single horse was injured or went lame during filming; circus animals may have been used according to some online speculation.
The American Humane Association put Bite the Bullet on a list of pictures for the organization’s members to avoid, suggesting that horses were improperly treated on set. Brooks vehemently denied the allegation, stating that no horse died or was injured during production. The 25 Jun 1975 HR reported that Cleveland Amory, president of The Fund for Animals Inc., came to Brooks’s defense, despite the film’s depiction of a horse falling backward off a cliff and another being “ridden to death” across a desert.
Candice Bergen rode her own horse for the film, so I like to think that if horses were being abused, she would have said something.
I’m with you Jean Marie. If anything, the film takes a firm stand against animal abuse by villifying those who partake in animal cruelty and by making the Hackman character a champion and defender of defenseless animals throughout the film.
The whole film, to me, is based upon the relationship, we may say the friendship, between Hackman and horses and his one, as well as Hackman and Coburn.
I’m not sure what to believe. We’ll probably never know the truth, one way or the other. Regardless, depictions of gross animal abuse are not something I care to see. And, I daresay, the film’s attitude toward such abuse was ambivalent rather than condemnatory, which doesn’t sit well with me.