In 1980’s Bronco Billy, Clint Eastwood plays Billy McCoy.

Billy is an aging cowboy, a trick-shooter who owns Bronco Billy’s Wild West, a traveling circus that has definitely seen better days.  Bronco Billy and his friends travel the country, going from small town to small town and putting on a show.  Billy is definitely the star and the highlight of each show is him shooting balloons and tossing a knife while his female assistant is strapped on a revolving disk.  Unfortunately, Billy’s latest assistant flinches and gets a knife in her leg.  Billy needs a new assistant and, wouldn’t you know it, Antoinette Lily (Sondra Locke) needs a job!

Antoinette is a runaway bride.  She married John Arlington (Geoffrey Lewis), not because she loved him but because she needed to get married by the time she turned 30 or she would lose her inheritance.  After the ceremony but before the wedding night, Antoinette fled.  The police assume that John murdered her and promptly arrest him.  John, suspecting that his wife is still alive, pleads insanity so that he can avoid the electric chair.

As Billy’s assistant, Antoinette challenges the way that Billy has always done the show, often to such an extent that you really have to wonder why she sticks around.  Since this is a Clint Eastwood film, there a bar brawl where Billy rescues her from being assaulted by a couple of rednecks.  Unfortunately, Antoinette’s arrival coincides with a string of accidents and other unfortunate incidents.  The other members of the show start to suspect that Antoinette might be bad luck.  Myself, I’m not superstitious and I don’t think that people can bring bad luck.  I think people make their own luck.  However, it’s hard to overlook the fact that Antoinette finds out that her husband is facing the death penalty due to her disappearance and her reaction is to basically shrug it off.  Sondra Locke gives a rather flat performance was Antoinette, suggesting none of the quirkiness necessary to make her anything more than a very childish and very self-centered person.  Antoinette is a role that demands the eccentricity of a young Sissy Spacek or Shelley Duvall or even Beverly D’Angelo, who did such a good job in Every Which Way But Loose.  Sondra Locke gives a boring performance and it drags down the film.

That said, there is a lot to like about Bronco Billy.  In many ways, this film feels like Clint Eastwood’s take on a Robert Altman film.  The plot is episodic and casual and the best scenes are the ones the emphasize the members of the circus as being a family of misfits.  (Indeed, one reason why Locke’s performance feels so jarringly wrong is because both she and Antoinette never seem to be interested in the other members of the show.)  Billy may be their leader and their main attraction but every member of the show plays a role in keeping Billy’s Wild West alive.  Scotman Crothers, Sam Bottoms, Bill McKinney, Dan Vadis, and Sierra Pecheur all give likable performances that bring the film’s world to life.  The film becomes about more than just the aging Billy trying to find his place in a changing world.  It’s a film about a group of people who have come together to form their own community and, by the end of the movie, it’s a community that you can’t help but love.  In many ways, this film features both Eastwood the director and Eastwood the actor at his gentlest and most humanistic.  Billy and his show bring the old west to a new America and, in the end, you’re happy they did.