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*** 1/2 “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid.”

MCA. $29.95. 1972. PG.

The most oft-filmed aborted bank robbery in movie history--in which the Jesse James-Cole Younger gang met their Midwestern Waterloo--becomes the centerpiece of a jokey rumination by writer-director Philip Kaufman on the absurdity, bawdiness and squalor of the Old West. This is a mud-and-guts Western, with Cliff Robertson as a benignly smiling, bullet-proof Younger and Robert Duvall as a psychotic, Messianic Jesse. (He comes across like a televangelist with six guns.) Though it’s clearly part of the then-current series of revisionist Westerns by Peckinpah, Altman and Penn, its originality, at the time, was less obvious. This film owes as much to Bergman and Fellini--and the Czech New Wave--as to the genre classics. It’s scathing, mordant and has one of cinema’s great dirty baseball games.