Author: Brian J. Noggle

Strangely enough, I watched the films in the Tom Selleck Western boxed set that I bought in June in reverse chronological order of when they were made and, perhaps, when they were set. Monte Walsh was made in 2003 and was set in 1892; Crossfire Trail was made in 2001 and was set in 1880; this film was made in 1997 and was set in 1865.

In this film, Selleck plays a returning Confederate Civil War veteran who comes back to his family in Texas after years away at war. He’s estranged from his wife and family and did not even learn that the youngest died while he was gone. They pack up to return to their homestead in Arizona (territory, of course, as it would not actually become a state for almost fifty years–1912) but find that other local ranchers, including one who served in the Union army, have moved into the valley. Conflict arises, abetted by a Confederate sympathizer running the local store and smuggling guns for the cause. Things come to a head, of course, and there’s gun play, and a resolution that brings the neighbors together and gets the husband and wife to start to reconcile.

Pretty stock stuff. To be honest, after watching three television Westerns in a row (and watching in the genre in watching The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. over the course of the last year or so), I’m ready to switch genres for a while. I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago not long after Crossfire Trail (I guess it’s only been a week and a half maybe–the review is dated July 17) but am only now getting to review it (and eventually to shelve it).

But I still like Tom Selleck as long as we can spread out the television Westerns over a longer period of time.

The film had Tracey Needham as the daughter of the rival ranching family.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Last Stand at Saber River (1997)” →

I saw this on Facebook the other day:

Posted by a social media account claiming to be Catherine Mary Stewart, who played the love interest in the first film from forty-one years ago.

Ah, gentle reader, as you might recall, some years ago I did a scientific study of reasons why The Last Starfighter is better than Star Wars (one of which is that Catherine Mary Stewart was/is prettier than Carrie Fischer).

But. No.

You know, I was a bit… uh… about Richard Hatch’s drive to resurrect Battlestar Galactica in the 1990s, only twenty years after the original series when the original characters would have…. twenty years later, had more adventures without having found Earth. The same with Red Dwarf, whose first six “series” I watched in 2024. The first six series were from 1988 to 1993. The last of the series was… what, 2017, with a movie in 2020? At some point or age, the original premise continuing on for decades gets depressing when one thinks about it.

The same with the recent cash-grab memberberries films like Bill and Ted Face the Music (although I saw Top Gun: Maverick in the cinema and liked it).

Fortunately, this thing, should it come to pass (the thing in development hell is The Last Starfighters which deals with Alex’s children–not sure how that would work that they would be his children, and twenty years later he has not rebuilt the Starfighter by then….

Eh. I won’t have to worry about it. I don’t watch streaming channels, and I don’t go to the movies any more (Was Top Gun: Maverick the last time I’ve been in a movie theater? Maybe!). I guess if Tom Selleck isn’t in it, I won’t see it anyway.

But stop trying to make my childhood relevant to this contemporary world. Just kidding. Stop trying to use things I valued in my childhood to extract money from me.

After watching the later Monte Walsh (from 2005), I picked this film from the Tom Selleck boxed set I bought in June because I have already seen Last Stand at Saber River–I already have it around here somewhere on DVD, which I’ll have to find and donate somewhere once I re-watch it to get the whole box set off of the video cabinet.

This is Louis L’Amour’s Crossfire Trail, so it’s based on a L’Amour book. In 2001, presumably that meant something on a movie. Probably not so much any more.

In it, a dying man on a ship asks Tom Selleck, playing Rafe Covington, to take care of his family and ranch. When the dying man finishes dying, Covington beats the captain of the ship, and he and two other shipmates leave the ship on the California coast with their wages, a packet from the dead man, and not the money they could have stolen from the captain while he was incapacitated. They part ways as the Irishman wants to go to Montana to work in the gold mines, and the youngster and Covington ride to the Wyoming ranch of the dead man. They visit the ranch and find that the widow has moved to town, so they set about restoring it. Covington town and earn the ire of a local badman who claims to have witnessed the dead man dying a year before in a Sioux attack–and Covington calls him a liar. A former ranch hand, played by Wilford Brimley, accompanies Covington back to the ranch, but before they get there, they help a Sioux woman, the daughter of Chief Red Cloud, who is fleeing from a trio of bad men who kidnapped her.

So the main conflicts are not only with the bad men, but also the local businessman, played by Mark Harmon, who wants the ranch and its 40,000 acres and petroleum as well as the widow (played by Virginia Madsen–I guess I can’t call watching this part of a Virginia Madsen kick as I last saw her in Sideways and Highlander 2: The Quickening two years ago). Covington is attracted to the widow as well, and she comes to appreciate him as well before the bang-bang shootout finish.

To be honest, I liked this film better than Monte Walsh because the central conflicts arose early instead of just some scenes of cowboying and some conflict arising in the second half.

As far as Brandman/Selleckverse, we have Barry Corbin in this film as well. Although Robert B. Parker does not have a writing credit, his son Daniel has a small role in it. And, to be honest, the big baddie Beau Dorn was played by Brad Johnson, whom I mistook for William Eads, the big baddie from Monte Walsh. They looked close enough dressed in black and in shadow that I thought this was a Lee Van Cleef situation, where the same actor played two different characters (in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly). But no.

So I have one left from the boxed set, and I’ll get to it soon, undoubtedly. And I’ll probably be mindful from here on out (meaning the Nixa book sale in August, which will feature racks of DVDs) to extend my Selleck collection. A boxed set of Blue Bloods? Maybe if it’s season one, although it would take me a while to get through it.

So I bought a three-pack boxed set of Tom Sellect television movie westerns at the Lutherans for Life garage sale in June, and apparently I have decided to wade into them now as I’m three hundred pages into Shōgun and am through five discs of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.. Because I’m all about living in the past, donchaknow?

At any rate, this was the leftmost in the box set, so I started here. Tom Selleck plays Monte Walsh, a cowboy when the frontier was closing. After a hard winter, most of the ranches in their corner of the West are out of business, and a large corporation is buying them out which creates hard times for cowboys. Some catch on with a corporate outfit, but when later cuts come, one of the crew turn to a life of crime including killing a colleague, leading Monte Walsh to have to track him down whilst thinking about what he will do when he, too, is let go. Maybe settle down with a saloon girls he’s sweet on? Nah, she dies. A lot of them die. It’s actually a pretty dark movie in terms of body count (it’s a remake of a 1970 Lee Marvin movie, which was undoubtedly true to its dark story). An unnecessary epilogue has Walsh returning to town and seeing that it has changed, and the colleagues who remain in town see that he has not.

To be honest, it’s more of a slice of cowboy life of the period; bits include roping, riding, and dealing with a cook who smells terribly–the cowboys forcibly bathe him–, breaking a bronco, getting insight into the life available as part of a wild west show, and so on. The actual gunplay and whatnot seems a bit tacked on at the end, as though it was not really the film that they wanted to make.

The film is a Michael Brandman production, and Robert B. Parker gets a partial writing credit on it. So it features what I might start calling the Selleckverse, or maybe Brandmanverse. William Devane is in it (he’s also in Thin Ice) as is William Sanderson (Daryl from Newhart all those many years ago–he’s been in so very much before and since, but he’ll always be Daryl to me).

It’s a serviceable film which I enjoyed more than Open Range–which I haven’t reported on because I have yet to complete watching it. Maybe its nature as a television movie limited the ponderous self-indulgence that bigger screen Western pictures seem to have. Also, I could watch Tom Selleck in anything (I did watch Her Alibi, after all, and I did see Three Men and a Baby over and over again because it was on Showtime in my trailer park days). He has and still does portray heroes one can try to emulate.

Strangely enough, this film came out within months of The Expendables (the original) in 2010, and it spawned a sequel as well. So it’s easy to compare and contrast them: Both assemble superteams of Boomer action(ish) actors showing that they still have it. This film, though, features Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren as the good guys and Richard Dreyfuss as the bad guy. So these are more serious actors than you get in the Expendables films, but to the same result.

Also, let it be noted that fifteen years later, we still have Boomers as action heroes because the Generation X actors are too pretty, and, c’mon, man, Shia Le Beouf? You want to make an actor with that name into an action hero we can aspire to be? Shia? Le Beouf?

Bruce Willis plays Frank Moses, who lives a lonely life whose only outlet is tearing up government checks and then calling the help line, where he talks to Sarah Ross (no relation to Barney Ross–or is there?), an analyst who helps him but who has gotten to talk to Frank about other things as well. When a black ops hit team tries to take out Frank, he takes them out instead and heads to Kansas City, Missouri, to protect Sarah, whom Frank knows will be in danger. But she’s a little reluctant, so he kidnaps her and takes her to New Orleans where he can get some information from a colleague, Joe, who’s in a nursing home (Freeman). Joe finds that a reporter in New York was working on a story was recently killed, but she had a list of CIA agents working on a mission in Guatemala in 1981…. So Frank gathers his friends, including a former Soviet agent and a British sniper, and they find a plot that goes all the way to the vice president who wants to be the president–if he can get clean from his past.

So it’s got some set pieces, some reverses, nice flourishes. Definitely a touch headier than The Expendables and its sequels. Willis was still Willis in the film. Amusing, and I’ll have to keep an eye out for the second in the series.

The film had Mary-Louise Parker as Sarah, the younger woman who flirted with Frank over the phone and then came to like-like him.

Continue reading “Movie Report: RED (2010)” →