Malone!

There was a Burt Reynolds movie from 1987 coming on late last night so naturally I had to sit there and watch it, if only in memory of Burt Reynolds watching parties gone by. It was MALONE, and I saw right away that it was a straight-up (if unofficial) contemporary remake of SHANE. Instead of a little boy, they made the hero-worshipper a teenage girl (Cynthia Gibb, pictured, worshipping Malone). They also removed the mother from the story, resulting in the truly uncomfortable consequence of the hero-worshipping child taking on some aspects of the lonely prairie wife (I am sure you recall Jean Arthur making eyes at Alan Ladd in SHANE). That ain't right, I tell ya! Malone was like Shane with a really extraordinarily puffy hairpiece. But I guess SHANE wasn't good enough. Remember the guy who wants all the townspeople to clear off their land in SHANE? In this version, he still wants the townspeople to clear off their land but I'm pretty sure he wants to take over America too! It wasn't exactly clear what the bad guy wanted, but he had a big map of the USA in his office and babbled about patriotism a lot and had an army of assassins to do his bidding, so I think I'm right. Plus he had a henchman who was the spitting image of Leonard from NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Anyhow, they end the SHANE part of the movie twenty minutes early and Burt Reynolds spends the final twenty minutes just killing people. One guy he kills with a bale of hay.