My Father's Guitar

I cannot say that I have ever seen a Beau Bridges performance that was not somewhere between boring and coma-inducing. I avoid anything with him as a main actor, so I have not seen anything by him over the past 40 years.

In this episode of Gunsmoke, Beau Bridges is trying hard to be Jack Nicholson, and failing horribly. Jack Nicholson did several Westerns in the early to mid 1960s, and had that silent mentally-disturbed act down to a science. Bridges on the other hand looks constipated. He kills a guy who wants him to play the guitar. He kills a guy that touches his guitar. He manages to make it all boring.

At some point Bridges crosses two cowboys that want some payback for his weirdness. Steve Ihnat and Charles Dierkop are perfect as just a couple of cowboys who are not buying Bridges' brand of bull. Both of those actors knew how to play roughnecks, and here they give sad little Beau a run for his money.

Eventually Matt Dillon gets involved, and all the evil-doers are sorted out. The last ten minutes of this episode get pretty good, once karma starts to catch up to Beau Bridges.