The Missouri Breaks (126 mins, 15) Directed by Arthur Penn; starring Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Lloyd

In the bicentennial year of 1976, the western, which the great historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr called 'America's distinctive contribution to the film', came to a virtual end. Thereafter, there has been the merest trickle of westerns, few of them major. But a couple of days either side of 4 July 1976, three great westerns were released - Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks, Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josie Wales and Don Siegel's The Shootist, starring John Wayne in his final film as an ageing, cancer-riddled gunfighter.

Like all westerns, they reflected the temper of their times and featured iconic performers. None did particularly well at the box office, and The Missouri Breaks, arguably the most remarkable of the three, was rejected by puzzled audiences and disliked by most critics, though not by me (I wrote a long admiring review for the New Statesman ).

It's been out of circulation for years, but thanks to the current Jack Nicholson season at the NFT, it's back again and ought to be widely shown. Made in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, when the counterculture was in its uncertain last phrase, The Missouri Breaks is an elliptical film, modern in manner but highly realistic in its depiction of frontier life in the Montana of the 1880s.

A rich rancher, Braxton, who boasts of bringing 8,000 cattle and 3,000 works of English literature to Montana in the same year, is the unacceptable face of capitalism, hanging any rustler that crosses his path. His enemies are a band of scruffy, likable horse thieves led by Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), a sort of hippy community on horseback who mock the rancher's stiffness and arrogance.

To see them off, Braxton brings in Robert E. Lee Clayton, a 'regulator', to track them down. He's played by an overweight Marlon Brando, whose extravagant manner and accent seem to be sending up Richard Harris, who appeared with him in Mutiny on the Bounty. Clayton is one of those protean conman figures we find in Melville, Pynchon and Nabokov.

Every time he appears, he's differently dressed (as a woman, an Indian, a priest, a Southern gentleman) and disposes of his victims in ingeniously sadistic ways. He's full of destructive self-hatred, as opposed to Logan's easygoing geniality, and their scenes together are masterclasses of competitive acting where banter conceals terrible dangers.

This is a rich, allusive movie, witty, tinged with tragedy, and beautifully lit in the style of paintings by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. Its lovely heroine, Kathleen Lloyd, a raven-haired beauty from California, made her first screen appearance here and then more or less disappeared.