Goin’ south

A remarkable actor’s and director’s film by Jack Nicholson, who reveals an extreme side of his burlesque talents within the genre of the comic western. Nicholson was aware that he was running a risk: ‘It is difficult directing yourself in comedy, because you have no idea whether you are going over the top’. According to many critics Nicholson did indeed go over the top as an actor but that can also be regarded as an attractive side to the film. Nicholson never had an opportunity to play out his insanity as much as in Goin’ South.The film’s photography is also far from average. Nicholson trusted the camera-work to the famous Nestor Almendros who registered the Tex-Mex landscape in all its heat and drought and provided the dark interiors with a warm romantic glow.The film plays with the clichés of the old western. The outlaw Henry Moon (Jack Nicholson) seems to have walked off the set of a different kind of western form the one he now finds himself in; he is repeatedly stunned when his fellow actors break the rules of the genre. Moon is saved from the gallows by Julia Tate (Mary Steenburgen), but it takes the whole film before Moon becomes more than a clumsy and cheap servant for Julia.Nicholson has complained in interviews that people did not notice the extra significance of the film. ‘The characters were once all members of Quantrill’s raiders, the originalguerilla warfare unit in America. And what do you do with these people once they’re now home?’. The parallel with returning Vietnam vets was however later recognised.