Five years after receiving enormous acclaim for their screenplay of the groundbreaking, tone-swerving Bonnie and Clyde (1967), writers Robert Benton and David Newman were at it again. Their Bad Company is a worthy companion piece to their ’67 classic, with its doses of comedy, unsettling blasts of violence, travels through a hard-times American heartland, and thieving main characters. However, the film caused little stir when it was released and was soon forgotten. Not only did Benton co-write Bad Company but he also made his directorial debut with it. (Arthur Penn directed Bonnie and Clyde.) Set during the Civil War, it’s a war film that never gets near the war. Because the lead characters head west, it’s something of a western, though the “West” being sought never quite materializes, and is thus more an idea than a reality. With the war raging north, south, and east, and the West a question mark, Bad Company presents an America without a safe haven, a nation whose identity is in limbo. You might say that Bad Company, like Easy Rider, is “looking for America.” It’s a tale of displacement, a bit of historical fiction that illuminates an off-kilter time. Although it is set on the fringes of the big story (the war), the pain and loss of that conflict hovers over the film as the underlying cause of everything that takes place. Sometimes period films are marred by contemporary acting styles or forced modern sensibilities, but in Bad Company’s case the New Hollywood brashness of a cast led by a young Jeff Bridges results in an immediacy of identifiable feeling that makes effortless the potent connection between this tale of draft dodgers and a 1972 America in the thick of the Vietnam War.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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