Bite the Bullet

I had recorded several Gene Hackman movies on DVR a few weeks ago and never bothered to watch them. Last night I finally played Bite the Bullet with Hackman, Candace Bergen and James Coburn. Ninety-five percent of this movie was exciting and genuinely moving. Great for the new flatscreen. It's about a 700-mile horse race sponsored by the press around the turn of the last century in the southwest.

Above all, it's a good story about some very likable people, but they do make quiet allusions to aspects of the year it came out (1970). Hackman's character is gently chided for being "un-American" for not really caring who wins. It's mentioned about half way through that Hackman and Coburn are both former Rough Riders, and neither seem particularly impressed by Roosevelt's bombastic call through the papers for them to remember San Juan Hill.

This has to be one of the first and best movies that both addresses and depicts how cruel people can be to dumb animals. Some of the scenes of overworking horses will wreck you if you're not prepared for them.

It goes briefly zany near the end with Candace Bergen's subplot (her hair and the scenes with her boyfriend break the era in that Bo Derek/Tarzn kind of way). The movie would have been better without it but is too good to be derailed.

What struck me though was that this forgotten movie (forgotten only in the sense I'd never heard of it) might speak better to our times right now than it did then. I had caught myself thinking how odd it was that Hollywood continued making all of these great movies, and people kept flocking to them, while Vietnam raged and our people were dying in a losing war. And just this morning I read that we lost eight soldiers in a surprise attack by militia in Afghanistan.

Beyond Vietnam, what resonated even more for me was that the race is sponsored by a newspaper, which meets with the contestants every night and telegraphs the events to the rest of the avidly watching world. I don't know how that part of this movie might have resonated in 1970, but it seems only more pertinent now with our country's sad addiction to reality television--the chance for anyone, no matter their quality, to feel fame.