PFA audiences know the Berkeley-based novelist, poet, and screenwriter Barry Gifford also as a film critic from the book (and 1991 film series) The Devil Thumbs a Ride and the newer Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir. Gifford brings his signature style to another work of film criticism in Brando Rides Alone, a reconsideration of the film One Eyed Jacks, which started and ended Marlon Brando's career as a film director.

Marlon Brando and Karl Malden fill the boots of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett (thinly disguised as “Rio” and “Dad Longworth”) in Brando's Freudian epic, dubbed by reviewers “one of the first anti-hero Westerns.” Real cowboys, aging starlets, a twenty-nine-year-old Stanley Kubrick, and the stunning Central California coastline round out the cast. Gifford writes, “That Brando never again directed a movie may or may not have been a good thing, but with One-Eyed Jacks he accomplished what more celebrated directors could seldom do: he made an unforgettable film.”