After "Dirty Harry," Eastwood returns to the West to work for the first time and the last with John Sturges...
With quality Westerns like "Bad Day at Black Rock," "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," and "The Magnificent Seven", Sturges would be the right filmmaker to accelerate Eastwood's cowboy career... In the event he wasn't...
The excellent sketching of characters and the poignancy of the dilemma of the peasants which made "The Magnificent Seven" such a classic Western were deplorably absent in "Joe Kidd" and the film never escaped from the weakness of its own screenplay...
Eastwood brought some of the qualities of Leone Stranger, but lacked his style, his wit and his class...
The film is set in the small town of Sinola, New Mexico, at the turn of the century... Mexican peasants find themselves being exploited and persecuted by American landholders, most notably land baron Frank Harlan (Robert Duvall). The peasants find a charismatic leader in Luis Chama (John Saxon), who takes them before a biased judge to defend their land rights...
Upon learning the judge's nature, the Mexicans turn to violence and nearly kill the judge whose life is saved by Joe Kidd (Clint Eastwood), a prisoner jailed for drinking too much...
This action endears Kidd to Harlan, who recruits him as a tracker for the posse he has hired to annihilate the poor Mexicans who oppose him...
However, Kidd's commitment to Harlan's cause grows weaker the more he observes the landowner's methods... At one stage Harlan takes over a small Mexican town and threatens to kill all the inhabitants if Chama does not give himself up by a specified dead time... Kidd considers the action cowardly, and decides to change sides and join Chama's forces...
If you are happy to see Eastwood back in the saddle, and you want to watch him with Robert Duvall, don't miss this highly forgettable Western... I'm quite sure it will manage to hold your attention...
