Cinema: Mixed Company

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THE CULPEPPER CATTLE CO.

Directed by DICK RICHARDS

Screenplay by ERIC BERCOVICI and GREGORY PRENTISS

"Cowboyin'," the cook confides to the eager kid, "is somethin' you do when you can't do nothin' else." At its best moments The Culpepper Cattle Co. puts across several such gruff insights about a way of life now long past.

Dick Richards, here making his first feature, is a former director of television commercials, an apprenticeship that presents several liabilities when it comes to filming anything longer than 60 seconds. The movie has a tendency to be episodic and rather punchy, and the visual style is too pretty. Every time the cowboys saddle up it looks as if they're about to ride up the arroyo for a Pepsi.

The script owes some of its incident and much of its spirit to Monte Walsh, both the Jack Schaefer novel and William Fraker's underrated film version. But Culpepper is less about growing old than coming of age. Ben Mockridge (Gary Grimes) is barely past his teens when he talks Trail Boss Frank Culpepper (Billy "Green" Bush) into taking him along on a drive. Ben is hired on as "little Mary" (cook's helper), and he has to work his predictable way up from there.

The dazzling Southwest scenery is present in abundance, but it is functional, not merely decorative. And whenever the movie moves indoors, usually to a saloon, the sets—however slickly photographed—are appropriately dark and tumbledown, as if some New Mexico ghost town had been converted into a sound stage.

Grimes, who underwent a somewhat less violent coming of age in The Summer of '42, has a scene in Culpepper that is served up to him as a piping hot cliché: The Kid's First Drink. He handles the whole thing very gracefully by taking his belt, swallowing hard and flashing a quick victory grin at his disappointed companions. Bush, so good as Jack Nicholson's hillbilly buddy in Five Easy Pieces, is even better here—prickly and sardonic. The other members of the Culpepper outfit are stolid and laconic, but most of them (especially Luke Askew and Bo Hopkins) manage to be interesting anyhow.

Jay Cocks