Synopsis
Ella Connors is a single woman who gets pressured to sell her failing cattle farm to her corrupt ex-suitor, Jacob Ewing. She asks for help from her neighbor, Frank Athearn. As Ella and Frank fight back through stampedes, jealousy, betrayal, and sabotage... they eventually find love.
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Cast
- James CaanFrank 'Buck' Athearn
- Jane FondaElla Connors
- Jason RobardsJacob 'J.W.' Ewing
- George GrizzardNeil Atkinson
- Richard FarnsworthDodger
- Mark HarmonBilly Joe Meynert
- Macon McCalmanVirgil Hoverton
- Basil HoffmanGeorge Bascomb
- James KeachEmil Kroegh
- Jim DavisJulie Blocker
Recommendations
- 50
The New Yorker
So self-conscious about its themes that nothing in the storytelling occurs naturally. - 50
Time Out
Visually superb, though: a doomed attempt to make Fordian metaphors speak a language of corrupting, intimate anxiety. - 50
Los Angeles Times
Handsome but overly studied. [09 Mar 1986, p.5] - 40
Empire
Director Alan Pakula's sympathies seem to lie in the landscape, never less than exquisitely framed. But even this mute star can't fill the space left by dour performances. - 40
Variety
Alan Pakula’s Comes a Horseman is so lethargic not even Jane Fonda, James Caan and Jason Robards can bring excitement to this artific- ially dramatic story of a stubborn rancher who won’t surrender to the local land baron. - 40
New York Magazine (Vulture)
[Pakula] has made the dreary mistake of reducing a half-dead genre to its basic elements, stripping away color, detail, humor--everything that makes it possible to regard a Western as a pleasure rather than an ordeal. [13 Nov 1978, p.128] - 40
Washington Post
Each new attempt to revive the Western seems to plunge the patient into a deeper coma. Arriving on the heels of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South, Alan J. Pakula's cataleptic Comes a Horseman suggests a conspiracy to kick the poor old Western while it's down. [25 Oct 1978, p.D13]
