Trust Walter Hill, a nose-to-the-grindstone action director, to resist the lure of the Big Theme. Of course you can, if you really want to, hear some echoes of the Vietnam War (best traceable to co-scriptwriter John Milius) in the futile and costly pursuit of indigenous guerrillas. And there are some sparse and laconic position statements, a little less sparse closer to the end, although no unnatural and anachronistic chewing-over of the rights and wrongs of White-Eye's treatment of the Indian. That's left to later generations and to more pious movies (Dances with Wolves). Hill has made better Westerns before: The Long Riders, the modern-dress Extreme Prejudice. In fact he has made better Westerns when he was not making a Western: The Driver, The Warriors, Streets of Fire. But this one (with no small debt to Dances with Wolves) has enabled him to come out of hiding, to throw off the camouflage, and to express openly a sentiment common to Westerns, though a new one to Hill: a quasi-anthropological tristesse over a fading way of life. That sentiment embraces, as well, a fading cinematic genre. Jason Patric, Wes Studi, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Matt Damon. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd