The Comeback Trail
Short description
Max Barber is a struggling Hollywood producer in 1974 whose latest low-budget picture has flopped and who owes money to the mob. Under pressure from a loan shark, he and his partner Walter Creason devise a scheme: cast an aging western star, Duke Montana, in a new film full of dangerous stunts, arrange for him to die on set, and collect the insurance payout. The plan runs into trouble because Duke, a depressed alcoholic near the end of his career, keeps surviving every hazard they put in front of him.
The Comeback Trail is a comedy crime film directed by George Gallo, who wrote the screenplay with Josh Posner. It is the eighth of ten features Gallo has directed, arriving between The Poison Rose and Vanquish. Robert De Niro plays Max, with Morgan Freeman as Reggie Fontaine, Tommy Lee Jones as Duke Montana, Zach Braff, Emile Hirsch and Kate Katzman rounding out the main cast.
The production cost around 25 million dollars and returned roughly 2 million at the worldwide box office. On IMDb it holds 5.7 out of 10 from about 14,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 5.8 from 381 votes, showing modest and similar audience reactions on both platforms. A critics' rating of 5.3 from 27 reviews places professional response slightly below those viewer scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The fictional film company Miracle Pictures, with the slogan “If a film is good, it’s a Miracle Picture” (the word translating to “miracle”), first appeared in Allan Arkush and Joe Dante’s comedic thriller “Hollywood Boulevard” (1976), where its owner was played by Dick Miller. It also appeared in the 1987 science fiction comedy “Amazon Women on the Moon” (Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton, John Landis, Robert K. Weiss). Dante, who worked on both films, also directed “Matinee,” about the fictional horror film “Mant,” about a creature that was half-man, half-ant. This film features a poster for the fictional film “Mantula,” about a creature that is half-man, half-tarantula.
- The film was shot in 2019 for release in 2020, and it was indeed released in many countries in 2020, but in the US – only in early 2025.
- The film contains numerous humorous references to Hollywood films in general and Westerns in particular, but special emphasis is placed on “The Searchers” (1956) by John Ford. Duke Montana, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is to a certain extent Cherokee, which is a reference to the character in “The Searchers” played by Jeffrey Hunter, who was also to the same extent Cherokee. Native Americans are played by actors of German origin, which is likely another reference to “The Searchers,” where the tribe’s chief was played by Henry Brandon, who was born in Germany and played many Native Americans throughout his film career. At the end of the film, in the scene where a car passes by a church, there is the famous final shot from “The Searchers” (a sunlit doorway, shot from inside a dark room).
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