The Cullpepper Cattle Co.
1972
Directed by Dick Richards
Written by Dick Richards, Eric Bercovici, and Gregory Prentiss
Notable for: Banjo abuse, faux western homilies
Explosions: Zero
My first Bruckheimer film arrived the other day. My wife was baffled, since she had no idea it was on our Netflix. In fact, she had no idea that such a film existed, let alone that I wanted to watch it. But when she performed her due diligence and looked it up, she was impressed that Bo Hopkins was in it.
Me-"Who's Bo Hopkins?"
Anita-"You'll know him. Blonde-haired guy. He was in two Peckinpah movies."
Shoot, it wasn't Warren Oates, but still, that seemed to be some mark of quality. My interest built, and I began to look forward to getting some time to sit down and delve into Cullpepper. It's important to note that since Bruckheimer was only the assistant producer on this film, I wouldn't give him full credit on Cullpepper's merits.
After watching it, I couldn't assign full blame to him either.
Ben Mockridge (Gary Grimes from Summer Of '42) is a 16-year-old with a dream. He wants to be a cowboy, so much so that he spends $4 on a pistol and holster. He shows it to his friend, who hates his life on a chicken farm. That's all we really learn about this friend, setting the pattern for every single character.
Within ten minutes, Ben has fulfilled his dream by going to talk to Frank Cullpepper, who is taking 2000 head of cattle up to Colorado, albeit as the cooks assistant, or "Little Mary." When they set off, The cook and Ben are sitting on a covered wagon, and Ben is enthusiastic about his life as a cowboy and what lies ahead for them. "Wait'll we get to the desert. Sand scorching your eyeballs. Drivin' through country that aint' fit for scavengers and hot enough to make you drink your own piss.
The film is entirely populated by two-dimensional characters. Maybe. When first goes to speak to Cullpepper, Ben is wordlessly directed to him by a man with a wooden leg. Minutes later someone is trampled to death in a cattle stampede, his identity revealed in the aftermath by a shot of a wooden leg separated from its master. So that character wasn't even two-dimensional. Wooden Leg was a dot, a point, an artificial limb that didn't even get a speaking part. You don't care that he's dead, but that's okay, because no one in the film seems to care, either.
And on it goes. They camp. There are shootings. Ben loses his gun and horse to dishonest trappers, and eventually gets it back with more shootings. They ride. Banjo music plays. The horses are stolen while Ben is on watch, and, following some shooting, they get them back.
All of this transpires with an economy of banal dialogue. With the exception of the cook, everyone is written like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, minus the cool, and you can't have a film with 10 Clint Eastwoods and zero foils.
Around the seventy-five-minute mark (right around the time the film should wrap up), the cattle herders are run off the property of a greedy land baron, and they encounter a group of religious pacifists. It turns out that they haven't gone far enough, because the pacifists and the cowboys are still on the land baron's property. They are given one hour to vacate. The pacifists are determined to stay, and Ben decides that they need someone to help them. While Cullpepper and his crew rides off, Ben prepares to do the right thing, even if it means his end.
But wait, four mercenary cowboys–including the aforementioned Bo Hopkins–decide to abandon Cullpepper and help Ben. Their motives for refuting everything we know about them aren't confusing, they simply don't exist. They ride back, set up for one last unexciting battle. When the smoke clears, the gunfighters on both sides are all dead, save Ben. Feeling the land is tainted, the pacifists decide to leave, but Ben levels his gun at their leader and insists they help him bury the bodies.
***MESSAGE ALERT***
Standing by one of the open graves, Ben unfastens his holster and drops his gun in the grave. End.
I suppose there was really no other way to end this movie. There was no dramatic tension, no interesting characters, and no real theme up until the final episode. This was in the Viet Nam era, and I can only imagine that the script for Cullpepper passed through the hands of a studio executive who thought "This is a film the kids will really get."
Bruckheimerisms: None that I noticed. The deaths were artless and the characters were downright boring. However, Bruckheimer went on to produce another film by Dick Richards, March Or Die.
What I learned: If you're going to try to manipulate the audience, you need to set it up a lot earlier than 15 minutes before the end of the film.
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