Brynner spent so much time in his career playing scowling, serious guys that it comes as a shock to see him as the sort of lusty scamp that Burt Lancaster and Errol Flynn used to specialize in. Catlow is a comedy, an adventure picture and a buddy film; it isn’t great, but it’s definitely entertaining.
Conagher offers plenty of cowboy action—fighting, rustling, Indian danger, folks doing right, others doing wrong—but the 1991 movie is a romance all the same. Hard-bark cowpoke Conagher (Sam Elliott) and a widowed woman (Katherine Ross), with two children, circle each other and eventually connect. Figuring ways to introduce capable, untutored loners to soulful frontier women is a theme, a good one, that L’Amour kept returning to.
About a Tennessee family named Sackett and their adventures out West, the two-part, 1979 miniseries The Sacketts opened the door for a string of Sam Elliott and Tom Selleck Westerns. For a picture with its share of drama, The Sacketts has a meandering quality; it shuffles from event to event, and it desperately needs a little humor and a lot more heat, especially where Selleck is concerned. The best thing about this miniseries was the parade of familiar faces: Mercedes McCambridge, Ruth Roman, Glenn Ford, Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Gilbert Roland, Pat Buttram, Buck Taylor, Gene Evans and Ben Johnson.
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