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Lonesome Dove (1989)

Helluva Vision!

Lonesome Dove can be summed up in the two word reply that Woodrow McCall (Tommy Lee Jones) gives to a journalist at the end of his epic adventure: "helluva vision".

And Lonesome Dove really is a compelling and remarkably full vision. It capitalises on the rip-roaring adventure that the 'Wild West' has always offered to literature and film, but it deepens its adventure tale with well fleshed out characters and solid themes (such as friendship, its joy and loss).

The character depth of Lonesome Dove owes a lot to the original novel by Larry McMurtry, which won the highest honour possible for an American novel: the Pulitzer Prize. Many other good Western novels have been heavily cut and filleted to squeeze into two hour films. So it was an inspired decision to adapt Lonesome Dove into a six hour tv mini series, as that meant the novel could be followed quite closely and the characters could develop more fully.

But it takes excellent actors to interpret in the flesh the characters so skilfully drawn in the novel. The whole cast is first-rate, but I'd like to single out one extraordinary performance: Robert Duvall as Gus McCrae. The character of Gus couldn't be more different to Duvall's other famous roles as the family lawyer in the Godfather (1972) and the crazy colonel in Apocalypse Now (1979). But it's as Gus McCrae, the free-wheeling lover of life, that Robert Duvall reaches the apotheosis of his great talent.

Only Ebenezer Scrooge would rate Lonesome Dove less than ten. It's a helluva vision.