Some films warrant the 4K digital restoration treatment more than others. The 1982 Phillip Borsos charmer “The Grey Fox,” streaming Friday by way of Music Box Virtual Cinema, deserved it, as anyone with eyes can tell you.
It’s a honeyed, turn-of-the-century evocation of how the true-life “gentleman bandit” Bill Miner operated, first as a stagecoach robber in the 19th century and then a train robber in the 20th. Richard Farnsworth plays Miner, and while Farnsworth is the movie, there’s a movie there to support what he does so wonderfully well.
When it came out 28 years ago, Farnsworth had already received an Oscar nomination for “Comes a Horseman.” He’d served as a stunt man, heavy on the Westerns, for decades before earning small roles in the margins, a few lines here and there. There’s a story of director Howard Hawks telling Montgomery Clift to keep an eye on Farnsworth while filming the 1948 cattle drive classic “Red River.” That’s how a cowboy really walks, and talks, and moves, he said. Keep an eye on him.
In “The Grey Fox” Farnsworth, then 63, displayed effortless ease and genuine, unaffected grace, and seeing the digital restoration reminded me of just how fantastic his face was, and is, in close-up. The script’s notion of Miner as a courtly, well-mannered thief may have been sparked by accounts of Miner’s personality, and then set down by screenwriter John Hunter. But plainly it comes straight out of Farnsworth’s own persona.
