User Reviews

Some westerns are carefully designed to emphasize one strong element that makes westerns what they are: the interface of man with the land. Its why we have so many farmers versus ranchers movies, I think. The folks behind this grind this into a potion, grabbing every element that they can. There's the story of course: about loyalty to the land regardless of the sacrifice. Even about the land as woman. We have Jane who understands this with her gait, her face, her body. And Robards who understands less and has a borderline silly plot line to carry that conflates sex with Jane and drilling on the land.

She really is fearless, projected more then than now, because at that point she was the prevailing "sex kitten." She is the earth, the land.

But much more profound is what Pakula has done with the horsework. The two leads, so far as one can tell, do their own riding. And what riding it is! I doubt if anyone has captured more complex movement of men and animals n terrain, often hilly. There are scenes that today would be done with animated cattle I suppose because they really do control these beasts. Actors! Except that when they do these things, they are doing it full out as selves — there is no barrier in these scenes. We see Jane and James no more acting than the horses are.

It has to be one of the most dynamically honest cinematic capturing of human and terrain, surely that I have seen. If you have a chance, See this with "Straight Story." Farnsworth has the type of death in this film that I suppose he would want to be remembered for. Its noble. Its married to the place. Its just how he carried himself in that last movie where he knew he was dying.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Although this movie came out in 1978 when I was 13 ,I don't remember ever seeing it first run. Tonight on Turner Classic Movies they are doing a Jane Fonda movie night -ho hum. Im not a fan of Ms Fonda rather I enjoy some of the other actors who play alongside her in some of her movies but I do not enjoy watching her ,she is rather annoying in her acting and most times would not surprise me if shes not acting but playing herself.James Caan costars as a cowboy she sells land to and his partner gets killed by Robards henchmen so he joins up with Fonda and Farnsworth. Anyway, the actors who make this movie are Farnsworth and Robards.Two of the sexiest mature stars of that time period ,both of them in their 50's but looking oh so hot. Robards the epitome of evil as a greedy land baron with that killer beard and piercing blue eyes and Farnsworth as Fonda's cowpuncher and friend Dodger-his ruggedly handsome face and western accent just sexy. Farnsworth has some of the best scenes and lines but he is on screen far too short and halfway through the film he dies. The way his death is played out was very upsetting to me and made me wish they hadn't killed him off. The way his death is played out is like this, Earlier in the movie ,Robards greedy oil baron partner starts looking for oil on Fondas land causing an explosion that riles Farnsworths horse causing the horse to fall down the side of a steep hill spilling Farnsworth onto the hard ground breaking several ribs and hurting him badly. In the best scene of the movie ,he is in bed in pain ,Fonda tells him it will be OK and Caan tenderly hands him some chewing tobacco,Farnsworth holds onto Caans hand and tells him what a great cowboy he is ,there is an unspoken bond they share at that moment as if passing the torch. Caan leaves and Farnsworth says to Fonda "Your daddy would be proud "and you know my days of roping and riding are through. She leaves the room upset. Farnsworth rolls over and looks at old pictures of himself and her father ,he looks so sad as if hes about to cry. The next scene has him painfully getting on his horse ,needing a chair to do so - Its obvious he thinks he is no longer useful and is riding off to die.So,He rides off and the next scene shows him lying unconscious on the ground next to a log with 2 riders approaching , fade to a scene of Fonda and Caan filling his grave. This part of the movie really ticked me off, all those years of him playing stunt-men and bit parts and he finally gets an Oscar worthy part and they kill him off.

Robards fares better as a sinister man who not only kills his oil baron rival but also tries to kill Fonda and Caan at the end of the movie by tying Fonda up and knocking Caan out and stuffing them in an upstairs closet while he burns the house down. The movie ends abruptly with Caan and Fonda escaping the burning house and facing Robards and his two henchmen. Caan shoots one of the henchmen and Fonda shoots the other leaving Robards. Caan shoots Robards off his horse but his foot catches one of the stirrups,with his life fading and Caan about to finish him off, Robards horse bolts and drags him across the ground viciously slamming him all over the place and then we see the horse fade off into the scenery. The house burns to the ground and then the scene fades out to black then back in to Fonda driving a old truck back to her burned down house. The camera pulls back to where all you can see is her pull into where her house was and you see two figures in the distance hug and the movie ends. It was disappointing ,youd think they would have had some dialog at the end to wrap it up. Im going to miss Mr Farnsworth and Mr Robards who both died in 2000. We will never see actors like that again. I gave the movie a 6 based on the following points - the scenery and Farnsworth/Robards acting rate a 10 but the movies plodding tone,abrupt and unsatisfying ending and Fonda and Caans wooden performances are barely a 2.

Superbly photographed against starkly impressive natural locations, this movie also boasts some effective action and stunt-work, but is undermined by the director's merciless TV style with its sluggish pacing and endless close-ups, plus a very talky script that still manages to skimp on charisma and characterization. The presence of character stereotypes like Farnsworth (a Walter Brennan clone) and even Robards himself does not help. And while George Grizzard is given a lot of footage in which to build up an interesting character, said character is then casually dismissed! All that build-up footage is virtually wasted and patrons will naturally feel cheated! Even the climax is short-winded, despite the fire. (An obvious dummy does duty for Robards). Jane Fonda's fans are also likely to feel cheated as she is not only unglamorously made up and photographed, but her acting is somewhat artificial. Caan walks through his role with his usual blankness. The movie does have a nice music score – what little can be hard of it through all the cattle stampedes and other sound effects!

So the banker and his father had lent money to rancher Ewing and never been repaid a dime? And then the banker just takes over the ranch? No equity at all for Ewing? And this just happened instantly? The foreclosure process takes time!

Absurd.

And then Ewing drags the local banker's body into Ella's house and she doesn't notice anything when she comes home?

Ewing then doesn't kill Ella but sticks her in the closet with the banker's body. The Sheriff would have easily have figured out that Ella wasn't the murderer.

And why not kill Frank rather than pistol whip him and put him in the same closet with Ella and the dead local banker.

Really a sorry script.

I've rarely been so totally disappointed by a movie as I was by this one. That's because it starts out so well! At the halfway mark, I was thinking I'd discovered one of the great westerns of all time. There's a wonderful sense of realism: the dirt, the sun, the hard work, these come through as in few other westerns I can think of. Jane Fonda does a great job as a weathered cowgirl who just refuses to give up. Caan is a bit out of place, but doesn't let things down, and Farnsworth is perfect as the old cowhand trying to get in just one more roundup. The romance between Caan and Fonda is under-played beautifully... you sense it, but never get the feeling that the writers forced it on the characters.

But then it all goes to pieces, with one of the stupidest endings I've ever seen on a major motion picture. Gone is the realism, the logic, the drama... everything, in fact, that you've been enjoying up till that point. All you've got left is cliché and stupidity: Snidely Wiplash twirling his mustachios over a truly moronic murder attempt (why didn't Robards just shoot everybody? or at least tie them up a bit better??), and an abrupt halt (you can't call it an "ending") that fails to resolve ANY of the film's more interesting plot lines. It's like first they ran out of ideas, then they ran out of film.

Most of Comes a Horseman is so good, I'd like to say it's worth watching, regardless. But the ultimate sense of frustration overwhelms any possible pleasure. Unless you literally have the discipline to switch off twenty minutes before the end, you definitely shouldn't waste your time on this sad misfire.

It was Easter weekend and I was typing the final draft in Allan's office as he and Dennis were revising. It was an excellent script and, I thought, very Steinbeckian. When I saw the movie I was very disappointed. The ending you saw was not the ending of the script I typed. The original ending was perfect; for me the ending in the release was a cop out. I heard later through the grapevine that the studio didn't like the original ending and said it had to be changed. Whether this is true or not, I'm not sure, but the ending was, indeed, changed. Had the original script been filmed, it would have been a much better movie.

I recall seeing this film as a first run movie in 1978, when I was on a date if Forest Hills, New York. It starred Jane Fonda and Jason Robards and this was only a year or two after they appeared together in JULIA so I figured it had to be above average. It was.

First of all it was set in fairly modern times (the late 1940s), and it updated some of the stereotypes in westerns. This led to a bit of unevenness towards the end (more about that later) but it also made the story more interesting.

Robards is the big local ranch owner, but he is not in a good situation. First, he is pining for Fonda - they were married at one time, but she left him. She owns (through inheritance) a small neighboring ranch that Robards' family once owned. Her chief assistant on the ranch is Richard Farnsworth (whose performance in this film finally took that wonderful actor out of stunt work into speaking roles). Farnsworth is a wise old bird, and keeps Fonda together when everything seems to be collapsing about her - due to pressures from others. The second ranch is owned by World War II veteran James Caan. Naturally, much to Robards' chagrin, Fonda and Caan start a romance.

But the modernization of this plot (which could be the plot from some old 1930s film with Caan's equivalent being a Civil War veteran), was that Robards is land rich, but money poor. It is the constant problem of ranchers and farmers (and land developers) alike: Yes you can make a fortune in properly run, land - based businesses, but you have to maintain the quality of the property. This means you need cash to upgrade the property, and make sure it is not going down-hill. But (in the case of ranching) one or two or three years of bad returns on the sales of cattle, horses, or crops and you may be unable to keep the money coming in. Such is the situation with Robards, who owes money to the local banker (James Keach). Robards is oddly enough in the position of a small farmer seeking a loan extension (say like the Oakies in THE GRAPES OF WRATH), but he is finding Keach less than sympathetic. The reason is that Keach is working with George Grizzard, a very wealthy oilman. They both realize that Robards' ranch is in jeopardy due to his bank debt, and they might be able to foreclose on it. Similar problems are there for both Fonda and Caan.

Up to two thirds of the film this was a very good movie, but the unevenness was (as pointed out by the critics) that economic circumstances should have joined Robards, Fonda, and Caan as a front against Grizzard and Keach. Had they done that the film would have been quite original. The failure to do so made the film's conclusion rather ordinary - although still a good film. The deaths of two of the characters in particular (I won't mention which) were quite striking.

"I heard the second living creature say, 'Come!' Then another horse came out, a fiery red one, its rider given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other." - The Book of Revelations

"Comes a Horseman" is an intermittently interesting western by Alan J. Pakula, a director mostly known for his conspiracy movies ("Klute", "All The Presidents Men", "The Parallax View" and the underrated, prophetic "Rollover"). It sports a fairly generic script – land barons bully small land owners off their property – but Pakula does several unorthodox things with the material.

And so unlike most westerns, Pakula sets his tale in the American West of the 1940s, and mirrors the war raging in Europe with two ranchers (James Caan and Jane Fonda) who must fend off similar expansionist dreams at home. Meanwhile, the "evil land baron" (Jason Robards, a common face in Westerns) who puts the squeeze on our heroes is himself being pressured by big oil corporations. The "oil drillings", "break-ins", "transgressions", and "penetrations" directed at female rancher Jane Fonda's land by ex-lover Robards then take on a psycho-sexual tinge. She's earthly, feminine, of the land, and all her interactions with Robards play like the traumatic confrontations between a rape victim and her tormentor.

The film contains two great scenes – a bizarre meal shared over a tiny table, and an early, shocking murder – but is mostly slow and lackadaisically paced. Pakula's visuals are pretty but stiff, and the film's final act is terrible, thanks to last minute rewrites and heavy studio interference.

The film features the always likable Richard Farnsworth (most famous for his roles in "The Straight Story" and "The Grey Fox") in a bit part, and some of the best horse riding and wrangling sequences in the genre. A stunt rider was killed during Pakula's production, but the actors do much of the riding themselves. The film offers a fairly low-key, realistic portrait of life on a ranch, but Pakula generic plot too often gets in the way of these more authentic moments.

7/10 – Worth one viewing.

A viewer who nowadays seeks out Alan Pakula's Comes a Horseman will probably already be familiar with the director's core achievement, his 70's "paranoia trilogy." For much of the way, Comes a Horseman may seem like an archetypally conscious "change of pace" - a slowly-paced Western, defined by big skies and vanishing plains, with a conniving cattle baron facing off against a hard-headed up-against-it woman who refuses to give up her land, eventually joined by a like-minded cowboy. The film's enjoyable enough in that mode, but its primary interest lies in the home stretch, as its thematic links with Pakula's other works come into focus. It takes place toward the end of WW2, and local interests are already looking ahead to a new economic era, where the imperative of fueling and feeding the troops will yield to domestic development, and the energy that powers it will reign supreme. For all his displays of power (his man-cave of a ranch is the film's sole imposing interior), the baron (Jason Robards) is in the pocket of the bank, and ultimately impotent to stop the exploratory drilling on his property; rather than capitulate and compromise his sense of himself, he chooses nihilistic, ultimately crazed, resistance. Although the two protagonists (Jane Fonda and James Caan, both at their most quiet and recessive) have a climactic moment of heroism, and a symbolic rebirth in flames, it's clear they're only participating in one atypical strand of a revolution that will transform America. Gordon Willis' cinematography eloquently embodies the duality, painting vistas of a scale and handsomeness that demand respectful submission, while darkly insinuating the looming threat from beyond the frame. A few years later, Pakula would cast Fonda at the centre of a worldwide financial meltdown in Rollover, a film more predictively and analytically ambitious than Comes a Horseman, and yet, for all its underappreciated near-greatness, more dated as a result.