Jared Moshe loved John Wayne movies, where the hero almost always commanded the screen. But while he enjoyed seeing Duke save the day, Moshe developed a greater appreciation for the colorful scene-stealers around him.
“I could see the sidekicks in those movies — Walter Brennan or Andy Devine — they were all these kooks and weird guys who were usually played for comic relief. Yet John Wayne would rely on them to watch his back and always be there,” Moshe said during the South by Southwest Film Festival. “I wanted to know who the man was behind that archetype.”
As Moshe’s affection for Westerns has carried over to his filmmaking career, The Ballad of Lefty Brown gives those sidekicks a chance to share the spotlight.
Bill Pullman stars in the title role as a simple-minded cowboy whose longtime partner (Peter Fonda) is killed on the range, prompting the grieving widow (Kathy Baker) to blame Lefty for the death. He becomes ostracized and determined to prove his innocence with reluctant assistance from the local sheriff (Tommy Flanagan) and a stranded teenager (Diego Josef).
“It’s something about this movie that’s rare,” Pullman said. “You get a color and a depth and a way of looking at human nature that you don’t get to see in many things.”
While exploring the harshness of frontier justice from the perspective of unsung gunslingers, Moshe also saw an opportunity to pay tribute to a consummate character actor in Pullman.
“When I first read it and met Jared, I wondered why he picked me. Even the day we were starting, I kept wondering who would take it away from me. Just like Lefty, I thought maybe there was somebody else for this job,” Pullman said. “Then I realized I didn’t want anyone else riding that horse.”
Filming took place in Montana, where Pullman owns a ranch and previously taught acting classes before his breakthrough in Hollywood in the late 1980s. Yet his acting experience in the Western genre has been limited outside of a prominent role in Wyatt Earp more than 20 years ago.
“Shooting in Montana was incredible. As soon as you get there, you’re a cowboy,” said Flanagan, who hails from Scotland. “I never actually met Bill Pullman until we finished shooting. As far as Lefty Brown, I thought that’s the way he conducted himself in life. On the last night, there was this stranger in the car talking to me.”
Moshe, who wrote and directed The Ballad of Lefty Brown, compares the enduring Western legacy in American culture to the popularity of samurai stories in Japan or tales of medieval knights in Europe.
“It’s one individual going out there and conquering,” Moshe said. “This is our mythology.”
