While geneally speaking I am a big fan of 20th century TV movies, which I watch fairly frequently, I have made it a policy not review them on this blog; I make an exception here for 'The Bounty Man', as it is what came up next in the Tarantino Grindhouse Box Set.
Produced by Aaron Spelling for the American Broadcast Company in 1972, at first I thought this may have been intended as a pilot movie, but given the way it ends I don't think so. Clint Walker, star of the 1955-1962 ABC western series 'Cheyenne', plays the bounty hunter Kinkaid, who is after high value outlaw Billy Riddle (John Ericson). Kinkaid succeeds in apprehending Riddle, but the bad guys girlfriend Mae (23 year old Margot Kidder) insists on accompaing them on the journey to the authorities. Along the way rival, less scrupulous bounty hunters, attempt as it were to jump Kinkaid's claim.
Fairly unremarkable western is mostly of intrest in Tarantino's selecting it for the box set circa 2007. There is here alot of what would make its way into later Tarantino films 'Django Unchained' and 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood'. Walker is an easily analogous figure to Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton, a TV western star of the Eisenhower/Kennedy years still working in genra TV in the Nixon era.
This is reasonably enjoyable in an undemanding TV kind of way, its unexceptionalness kind of its chief virtue. It's like watching an episode of 'Bounty Law' or 'Lancer'. **1/2
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