Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

crood As a made for TV movie from that time, it's OK. John Saxon is pretty good and it fits that he's the most recognizable of the main three characters.Calling it a remake is stretching things a bit. They changed a lot, including that the titular rifle doesn't get passed around nearly as much and isn't apparently as central to the story as in the original.The biggest change is to the relationship between hero and villain. In the original, it's a twist revealed only at the end and gives the whole thing a much more personal angle. Here, the relationship (cousins) makes the whole thing less personal. Also, they did a weird merge and split with the hero's character. Lin, played by Stewart in the original, has been combined with Wyatt Earp from that film. Some of his character was then split off into the newly created younger brother, who feel superfluous most of the time.There's one scene which just makes the hero look incredibly stupid by walking straight into what can only be an obvious trap. With the original easily available, there's no real reason to watch this one.

keithhire Not unwatchable, but close to it. I agree with malcomgsw, this pales in comparison to the classic from 1950, one of my personal favorites from any genre. The changes to the plot do not improve upon the original but overly complicate it - in this case less is more. John Saxon gives the best performance here, making the most of a thin script. Saxon is good at playing creeps, see him in "The Appaloosa" with Brando. Tom Tryon gives a wooden performance, shortly before giving up acting to become a writer. It was gratifying to see Dan Duryea from the earlier film, but his turn here seems tired, while in the original he was one of the more memorable villains in screen history. John Drew Barrymore's hippie character is unusual, but out of place in a western, kind of like Donald Sutherland in "Kelly's Heroes". All in all, an inferior remake of a superior film. I would, however, take issue with malcolmgsw's comment that some IMDb contributors seem to "want to eulogize the guns that are featured in films rather than dwell on their harmful consequences". We can of course, dwell on anything we want to, but while we're dwelling, what about the people living on the frontier whose lives were saved by having firearms nearby? Just saying.

malcolmgsw I don't know what it says about some of the contributors to this site that they seem to want to eulogise the guns that are featured in films rather than dwell on their harmful consequences.This is a cheap and shoddy TV remake by Universal of one of the great Westerns of all time.They have a determination to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator .It is quite apparent that they want to keep the cast list to below 10 and use all of their standing sets at Universal City.Their "Indian Tribe" seems to consist of just 2 individuals.The acting of the younger members of the cast is so wooden that you would believe that their faces are incapable of mobility.The shootout at the end is poorly staged and the whole film is a total bore which even a fine actor such as Dan Duryea cannot redeem.

garthfan This is a fantastic remake of the original that starred James Stewart. John Saxon plays the bad guy and guess who plays his father, Dan Duryea who also starred in the original. I hope someday they will distribute this on VHS or DVD. If not, I hope they will at least air it again on television.