Ultimately, One-Eyed Jacks comes together in an anti-climax, and this is the film's heart. During an age where the American Cowboy was synonymous with the trappings of a nation always ahead of the eight ball, Brando's debut was a scathing, and downright vicious dissection of the immaculate white hat. There are no heroes and no real villains, only victims of chance and circumstance, each of them wayward desperadoes desperate to finish what they started. Brando's final cut was over four hours long and he walked away from the project, letting the studios chop it down to 141 minutes. The final version, and the only one known to exist, is a compromised masterwork, presenting the struggles of the West as inevitable byproducts of a tarnished ideal of sovereign entitlement. Rio's inability to let the past go doesn't doom him, but it also doesn't offer him salvation, condemning him to and endless outlaw purgatory.