Film Studies: The last of the lone riders

We lost one of the Nebraskan actors last week, maybe the most intelligent and interesting. That is putting James Coburn high, I know, for Nebraska's actors include Robert Taylor, Henry Fonda, Nick Nolte, Montgomery Clift, Fred Astaire and Marlon Brando. (One day there has to be a scholarly study on why that land-locked state of corn, cattle, football and loneliness has produced so many great actors.) Well, Coburn got out of Nebraska as soon as he could and studied acting in Los Angeles and New York. He was tall, rangy and naturally ironic, and he soon found a place in movies doing those things – for Budd Boetticher in Ride Lonesome; as the knife-thrower in The Magnificent Seven; really acting for Don Siegel in the war film Hell is for Heroes (with Steve McQueen, one of his buddies). He was a flamboyant pirate in A High Wind in Jamaica and a one-armed scout in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee.

It was around then that Hollywood picked Coburn for stardom: he was so good-looking in a mocking, satanic way, and he had a baritone voice that could have been acquired testing single malts. So Coburn was cast as a hip secret agent in Our Man Flint and In Like Flint. Then, for his own company, and with a maverick director, Theodore J Flicker, he made The President's Analyst, still one of the great and forgotten American films and proof of Coburn's adult, satirical sensibility. In a wiser time that film would have been hailed as a masterpiece and Coburn would have been a great star.

That didn't happen, and something in the guy seemed to say, well, why worry, I can always be a character actor. As time went by, he had trouble with arthritis, and he made it a rule to devote a lot of time to several ladies. He became part of the Peckinpah crowd, did some second-unit directing on Convoy, helped write Cross of Iron and produced another little gem, The Honkers, directed by actor Steve Ihnat, in which he played a veteran rodeo rider.

It was a career which in the Eighties declined a good deal, because of illness, the vagaries of film acting and the plain fact that Coburn's voice could always earn a living doing commercials. But he had a joyous comeback as Nick Nolte's nasty father in Paul Schrader'sAffliction. That film waited the best part of two years to get a release because no distributor reckoned there was an audience for its harsh attitudes. But the picture did sneak out and Coburn won the supporting actor Oscar.

Yes, I have left the best to last, the one film that would put him in heaven if he had done nothing else. I mean Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, made by Sam Peckinpah in 1972. I'm not sure if anyone ever made a better Western, or one that said so much about the history of the American West – those two tracks did not always run in parallel.

No matter how far history supports this claim, Peckinpah saw Garrett as a wild guy once himself, a man on the edge of outlawry, and Billy's friend. And, if you know the full version of the picture, you know the superb opening where events of 1881 are cross-cut with those of 1908. So, as Garrett rides into Fort Sumner to warn Billy that in a few days he will be sheriff, so we see Garrett the old man (and this is true history) shot down and murdered by the descendants of the Santa Fe Ring, the business group that had appointed him sheriff in the first place, to finish the Kid.

So Garrett must kill his friend, and then await retribution, all in the name of progress. Which makes it the more touching that Coburn's loner likes to ride that beautiful country on his own, likes to savour the governor's brandy (and the governor was Lew Wallace, the man who wrote Ben-Hur), watch lone homesteaders float by on a raft down the river, suffer the disdain and abuse of his Mexican wife and take three whores to bed in one extraordinary scene while he is deciding whether he knows where the Kid is or not.

Coburn was a man who on screen had such difficulty doing anything without grace that he gave up on it. And if he was amused by some of the silly pictures he found himself doing, still he remembered Pat Garrett and what is one of the great performances in American film. If you doubt that, just watch the movie three or four times a year.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk