Blackthorn | Film review

A hard-sell, old-school Western made almost entirely by Spaniards, this dusty retro-saga has an autumnal Sam Shepard donning the chaps and sweaty henleys as a gray-panther Butch Cassidy. He’s living incognito in Bolivia in the early 20th century, pining to return home and hitching up with a mustachioed youngster (Eduardo Noriega) for one last job. It’s not an “event” Western, just a Western, with a heady dollop of post–Paul Newman wryness and visually monumental Bolivian landscapes. But the main attraction is Shepard, who was born to play cowboys aged out of their own era. (Wild Bunch remake, anyone?) The thrust here is relaxed, restrained, dusty and melancholic, a pungent strain of Westerns going back to Red River (1948) and exploding in the ’70s, and so out of fashion now you want to tip everybody concerned just for trying.