The myth of the American West, is, in Mateo Gil‘s BLACKTHORN, with an ingenious screenplay by Miguel Barros, still rugged and romanticized in its values, has neither loosened its grip on the imagination nor escaped the fog of nostalgia. One wonders what input Sam Shepard, in the leading role but also a master playwright on the theme, had into the project. Films like this and artists like Shepard look at that myth with fewer blinkers and an at times unforgiving stare. On an Odyssean journey home from Bolivia, a now elderly Butch Cassidy embraces as his final partner not a new Sundance but a world awareness and a social conscience. Shepard, with a face of cracked leather and a voice that might have been aged in a whiskey barrel, is just about perfect in the role.

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