Peckinpah’s elegiac portrait of an aging rodeo cowboy is, together with The Ballad of Cable Hogue, one of his gentlest films. Like so many of Peckinpah’s protagonists, the title character is a man who has outlived his time, returned from his wanderings to discover that his brother has sold the family homestead out from under their parents. Deliberately avoiding any vendetta story lines, Peckinpah turns away from plot to focus instead on the milieu of the cowboy—the cattle drive and the rodeo—revealed in marvelous slow motion and montage sequences. Most unusual is the extended familial portrait that emerges, one of the rare instances where Peckinpah avoids the ritualized fraternity of a male group. Junior Bonner's rich focus on character and milieu over story places it alongside such other staples of 1970s American cinema as the films of Robert Altman and the early work of Martin Scorsese.