Kid Blue

Bickford Waner arrives in the small Texas town of Dime Box hoping to leave his past behind and earn an honest living through a series of small jobs. He strikes up a friendship with Reese Ford and his wife Molly, but Molly soon seduces him, and the affair turns into a public scandal. When Bickford's former girlfriend Janet Conforto turns up, it emerges that he is in fact the notorious train robber known as Kid Blue. Humiliated and with his attempt at a straight life in ruins, he begins planning a crime again, while Sheriff John Simpson keeps a suspicious eye on him.

James Frawley directed this 1973 Western comedy, his first feature, from a screenplay by Bud Shrake and produced by Marvin Schwartz for 20th Century Fox on a budget of about two million dollars. Dennis Hopper plays Bickford, with Warren Oates as Reese, Lee Purcell as Molly, Janice Rule as Janet, Ben Johnson as the sheriff and Peter Boyle as Preacher Bob among a credited cast of twenty-one. Frawley went on to direct The Big Bus, The Muppet Movie, Wishman, Warm Hearts, Cold Feet, The Shamrock Conspiracy and Nancy Drew, so this film opens that run.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.2 from around 1,100 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7 from a much smaller tally of 19. The larger IMDb sample points to a mixed but not dismissive response, and the sparse TMDB figure reflects only limited voting rather than broad agreement.