“‘Tristam Shandy' goes to Montana; no wonder this film bewildered critics and audiences alike who were looking forward to an ‘honest' Western and an unblinking confrontation between Brando and Nicholson. What they got was a film as much attached to the empty land and its whimsical inhabitants as Thomas McGuane's best Montana novel, “Nobody's Angel.” But Arthur Penn has never felt bound to make dutiful nineteenth-century Westerns. The Left-Handed Gun and Little Big Man were channeled through twentieth-century sensibilities. Missouri Breaks is modern, too, in that it treats the Western as a familiar myth given as a subject to a group of actors in rehearsal. But that playfulness helps make it an eighteenth-century picture, as open as Laurence Sterne to digression, conversation and tall story.
“There are supporting actors to treasure: Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton and Frederic Forrest (who always seems happier when prowling around the edges of bigger stars than when dumped in the center himself). But it is Marlon Brando who best understands the mood. Instead of being a stern, relentless regulator--something he manages in a couple of seconds--he lets ‘Robert Lee Clayton' become a collection of smaller parts, all with their own hats and accents. No more a gimmick than the two actresses in Bunuel's Obscure Object of Desire, Missouri Breaks is a refreshing escape from the dumb law that actors have to be their one character all the time. After all, the nature of acting is to pretend; and the value of acting is in showing us how slippery real people need to be.” David Thomson