George Grizzard, James Caan, James Robards Jr.

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 bac...( read more  read more... )k through stampedes, jealousy, betrayal, and sabotage...they eventually find love.

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45% liked it

1,406 ratings

PG, 1 hr. 58 min.

Directed by: Alan J. Pakula

Release Date: October 25, 1978

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DVD Release Date: September 4, 2001

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Flixster Reviews (42)


  • October 5, 2009
    Has some good moments, but ugh.
  • October 4, 2009
    Alan J. Pakula's opening images bring to mind Ford's words to the young Spielberg, about directing boiling down to understanding when to put the horizon high and when to put it low in the frame. The project may be couched in its maker's reverence for Shane, but it also derives fr...( read more)om a small detail in The Parallax View, the brawl in the Western-styled lodge set to "Buttons 'n' Bows" -- Pakula approaches the open spaces of the frontier to escape from urban claustrophobia and instead finds reflections of it, lonely graves and cavernous rooms lit by oil lamps. The cowboy (James Caan) is a World War II vet riding through the hills of Montana, the heroine (Jane Fonda) is a taciturn "banshee woman boss" trying to keep her ranch from being devoured by her cousin, the land baron (Jason Robards). A dialogue with the genre's past is maintained throughout: Caan reveals his Gary Cooper side, Fonda shoulders her family's frontier legacy (The Ox-Bow Incident and Once Upon a Time in the West, mainly), open-air dances and cattle stampedes are patiently laid out while the land is dynamited for oil. The very '70s irony of Pakula's range war rests in the way even the villain's individualism is threatened by an anonymous system controlled by bankers hiding behind Gordon Willis's shadows. Much of it is mirrored laterally in Heaven's Gate and There Will Be Blood; elsewhere, the George Stevens influence is evident during Caan and Fonda's first shared meal, a single take follows the dying cowhand (Richard Farnsworth) as he climbs onto a horse and rides away into the beyond, and in the process records a lightning strike in the background. The closing shot posits a hopeful a new beginning, but only after a reminder of the problematic new decade just around the bend. With George Grizzard, and James Keach.

    --- Fernando F. Croce
  • July 5, 2009
    I will NOT see a Movie that has this Commie, Traitor, BITCH in it.
    They don't have a LOW enough rating for her.
    She can rot in the Hanoi Hilton, for what she did to Our troops during Vietnam.

    BURN BITCH, BURN
  • December 4, 2008
    nominated for best picture by NBR
  • April 15, 2007
    It's being remade at the sequel to Brokeback Mountain I believe.
  • December 4, 2006
    Yeah, i'd like to see what this is!

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