The Electric Horseman

It has become clear that any retrospective of Sydney Pollack's films is also something of a retrospective of Robert Redford's. The two teamed yet again in 1979 for The Electric Horseman, an easy to digest romantic comedy that was also a jeremiad against corporate America.

Redford plays a washed up rodeo star who is a pitchman for a large conglomerate's breakfast cereal. It is so beneath his dignity that he drowns his shame in booze while he's attended to by old pals (one of them played by Willie Nelson). His latest gig is to ride a champion race horse that has been purchased by the conglomerate as a corporate symbol during a Las Vegas stage show. Redford is outraged when he discovers the horse is doped with tranquilizers and steroids, and on an impulse he mounts the stallion and rides right out of Caesar's Palace and into the desert, planning on releasing him into a herd of wild mustangs.

Jane Fonda is a hard-nosed newswoman who manages to track him down, and here's where the movie goes south. Up until then it's an amiable mix of Redford's charm and self-satisfied anti-big-business feel-goodism. But they had to make this a romance, even though it defies all sense. Having Fonda's shrewish reporter fall for Redford's laconic cowboy just wants to make you throw things at the screen. Watching Fonda, who is tough as nails in the first half of the picture, basically do nothing but look adoringly at Redford in the second half is painful.

Still, this film has its merits, and goes down smooth, like good sipping whiskey. What it needs more of is Willie Nelson, who has a brief role and supplies two songs, "Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys," and then, rethinking the matter, "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys." He also has the film's best line, when he says, "I'm going to get a bottle of tequila and one of those Keno girls who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch and kinda kick back."