Regarded as a bit of an oddity on its release in 1976, Penn's brutally unflinching tale is now ready for the respect it deserves.

In Brando's malevolent Irish enforcer Robert E Clayton, it boasts a character as memorable as any to have emerged from that golden age of the Western.

Nicholson, too, puts in a performance of restraint at odds with the caricatures he was to become in subsequent movies.

He plays cattle rustler Tom Logan, the leader of a gang of outlaws including a bizarrely youthful Harry Dean Stanton as Calvin and a fresh-faced Randy Quaid as Little Todd.

Logan sets up his own ranch (with money stolen in a hilariously incompetent train robbery) to act as a staging post for illegal horses.

However, he begins to see the appeal of the rancher life especially when he strikes up a relationship with the daughter of the autocratic cattle baron Braxton (John McLiam).

It all comes a bit too late because Braxton has called in the services of psychotic regulator Clayton to track the rustlers down.

Clayton, as portrayed by Brando, is a compellingly sinister character who displays a hint of the supernatural in his second guessing of the movements of the gang.

Merrily delivering homespun philosophy with an Irish lilt, he also displays an icy brutality on occasion, for instance despatching Little Todd to a watery grave.

Penn maintains a taut yet languid pace, Thomas McGuane's script is grimily authentic and the whole caboodle skilfully sidesteps Western cliché.

Both funny and frightening, the intervening quarter century have failed to date this beguiling piece of cinema.

Tim Evans