Western Watch: The Rare Breed (1966)

Watched:  03/08/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing;  First

Director:  Andrew V. McClagen

A western-comedy-adventure movie fantasy about something weirdly specific - The Rare Breed (1966) is about the introduction of the Hereford steer to Texas.  Is this how it happened?  Most assuredly not. Do I care?  I do not.  

Because what the movie is about is really about dreams - who has them, how they can die or be put on ice, how we can find new ones, and how good does Maureen O'Hara look in green?*

Maureen O'Hara plays a British woman who was widowed en route to America, bringing a prize Hereford steer she plans to breed.  She and her husband planned to prove this type of steer could thrive in the US, and crossbreed well with local steer - but as he died she's now left to do it on her own.  So, O'Hara and her young-adult daughter, played by Juliet Mills (sister of Hayley), do what you did in the 19th century if you'd wound up here - they persevere.  

We meet them at a round up in, I think, St. Louis where they come across famed wrangler Bulldog Burnett (Jimmy Stewart).  Stewart earns their trust and is sent with them to deliver the bull in Texas.  However, he also takes money from a different rancher who wants the cow, and he's to deliver the cow to that guy.

Along the way, Stewart and O'Hara start to tentatively make eyes at each other/ find a respect, and Stewart decides to just deliver the bull to the rightful owner as well as deliver O'Hara and her daughter into safe hands.  This causes Jack Elam to be a Jack Elam character and try to kill all of them to get their cash.  In a narrow canyon, Stewart and O'Hara run into a young rancher (Don Galloway) leading a herd the other direction.  

I'll be honest, the stampede that Elam causes is truly scary.  I never know how they film stampedes in movies, but apparently it triggers something in my reptile brain and freaks me out quite a bit.  And as it's a herd of Longhorns, a type of steer I am visually very aware of and intimidated by on a good day, it's pretty good stuff.  Nice scene.

They make their way to the ranch they were originally looking for and the back half of the movie is about Stewart chasing O'Hara's dream for her while she feels that maybe she's been wrong about her dream and tries to just survive by cozying up to Galloway's rude Scottish father played by a very made-up Brian Keith.  

I'd been meaning to watch this movie for years just based on who is in it.  Stewart is always great, and he's in cantankerous older-guy mode here, which was a pretty good use of his talents.  O'Hara had moved into roles where she was a mother of women half her age (here, she's in her mid-40's), but the same grit she had shown in movies for almost three decades is still there.

As Stewart buys into O'Hara's dream - and she forgets it as survival becomes paramount - it's an interesting movie to watch here in middle-age.  Starting new things at this point is hard to do.  Let alone trying to survive on the plains of Texas in 1880 or so.  

Brian Keith goes all in as Flintheart Glomgold a Scottish immigrant who is a bit of a slob and is just looking at doing the same thing every day, even as his home falls apart around him.  It's a good role, comedic and completely outside of anything I've ever seen Keith do.  But an excellent counterpoint to O'Hara and Stewart.

The movie is not an action movie - but maybe an adventure movie?  It's from an era where genre was important, but a Western could be many things.  And this is one of those films.  It can be really funny, kind of moving, and always engaging.  It understands how to take complex ideas and make them make easy sense in the ways of good Hollywood screenwriting.  

Sure, it has a less-than-progressive take on Hispanics living with Anglos, full-stop.  But we haven't really solved that problem, have we Hollywood?

It's kind of wild to see this take on the Western and remember A Fistful of Dollars was two years prior.  Hollywood was continuing to use the American frontier as an almost fantasy setting to explore ideas relevant to all audiences but free of modern context while Italians were pushing the genre as universal and brutal mythmaking.  As I like to say - Westerns aren't a genre, they're a setting, and you can take the stories as concrete stories about a cow being introduced to Texas or you can get the story Jimmy Stewart and O'Hara's characters represent.

Fun facts:  The score is by John Williams, still a decade out from Star Wars.  And is directed by the same guy who did Wild Geese, North Sea Hijack and a few other movies I dig.  

*very good, indeed