After making a respectable directorial debut in 1971 with Drive, He Said, Jack Nicholson planned a mystical western called Moon Trap about a mountain man. But the project didn't please the studios and Nicholson eventually turned to Goin' South, an amiable and wayward western in which he escapes the gallows and rides away with Mary Steenburgen. Steenburgen got the part after Jane Fonda turned it down - she felt it was another Cat Ballou - and after newcomers Jessica Lange and Meryl Streep were tested. Owing much to the eccentric The Missouri Breaks, which Nicholson appeared in two years earlier, it's easy to enjoy, even if his trademark leers are no substitute for real acting. The picture, which features an early role for John Belushi, was a critical and commercial failure.

Henry Moon is captured for a capital offense by a posse when his horse quits while trying to escape to Mexico. He finds that there is a post-Civil War law in the small town that any single or widowed woman can save him from the gallows by marrying him.