Undeniably a cowboy movie, though not exactly a Western, set as it is in New Mexico circa World War II. At many points it may look and feel like a Western, with fine nostalgic images of men on horseback, occasional (possibly too frequent) splashes of calendar-art Southwest landscape, an idiomatic musical score by Carter Burwell, a hoedown, a bucking bronco, unfriendly games of poker, tense barroom faceoffs and fisticuffs. And the direct, as well as symbolic, conflict between the new, consolidating, monopolizing businessman and the free-as-the-wind cowpuncher is a traditional element, too, not a postwar perversion. But the period -- the heyday of film noir over on the coast, every bit as much as the heyday of John Ford -- also looses the self-aware femme fatale, the lust that drives men mad and best buddies apart, the impending doom and the forecast of same by a dusky fortune-teller, the impulse to self-destruct. It is as if James M. Cain had snatched the pen from the hand of Luke Short. The setting and the characters point in one direction, the period and the plotting take them another. And with that in mind, it makes a kind of sense that the project would fall to the director of The Grifters and The Hit, Britisher Stephen Frears. It has been well-publicized that Sam Peckinpah had once hoped to adapt the original Max Evans novella, and surely Frears is not the first person who would have come to mind as a substitute for Peckinpah. But the movie in some ways may have been fortunate in its long delay, whether or not in its assigned director. Twenty or twenty-five years earlier it would have been apt to appear more ordinary, more of a face in a crowd, whereas now it sports its old-fashionedness as a mark of distinction, an exoticness, an alienness. (Among the assorted antiquities: the greater beauty and strength of the bond between men than of that between a man and any woman; the blind eye turned to rape; the free-handed rewriting of the law; the ideal of the Marlboro Man, cigarette and all.) And the least you can say for Frears and his clean, straightforward, classical style is that he hasn't steered the thing down a path of trendiness or political correctness. You can perhaps say, more than that, that he has fashioned a one-of-a-kind hybrid. With Billy Crudup, Woody Harrelson, Patricia Arquette, Penelope Cruz, Sam Elliott. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd