Monte Walsh

Plot synopsis:
Montelius "Monte" Walsh (Tom Selleck) is an aging cowboy facing the final days of the Wild West era. He and his friend Chet Rollins (Keith Carradine), another long-time cowhand, work at whatever ranch work comes their way, but "nothing they can't do from a horse". Their lives are divided between months on the range and the occasional trip into town. Camaraderie and competition with the other cowboys fill their days. They seek work and take a job at the ranch of Cal Brennan (William Devane), where they meet an old friend, Shorty Austin (George Eads), another ranch hand.
Monte has a long-term relationship with an old flame, prostitute and saloon girl "Countess" Martine Bernard (Isabella Rossellini), who suffers from tuberculosis. Chet, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Mary Wilder (Lori Hallier), a widow who owns a hardware store. As barbed wire and railways steadily eliminate the need for the cowboy, Monte and his friends are left with fewer and fewer options. New work opportunities are available to them, but the freedom of the open prairie is what they long for. Shorty loses his job and gets involved in rustling and killing, gunning down a local lawman. Then Monte and Chet find that their lives on the range are inexorably redirected.
Chet marries Mary and goes to work in the store, telling Monte that their old way of life is simply disappearing. Caught up in the spirit of the moment, Monte asks Martine to marry him, and she accepts. Monte goes on a drinking binge and rides a wild bay horse that even Shorty could not tame through town, causing considerable damage.
A rodeo owner, Colonel Wilson (Wallace Shawn), sees him and offers him a job. Monte considers the high salary, but decides the work is too degrading and refuses. Eventually, they all must say goodbye to the lives they knew, and try to make a new start. When Shorty shoots and kills Chet while trying to rob the store, Monte, distraught after the death of his beloved Martine, goes after him.
Shorty arrives, and it is apparent that he knows of the fight to come with his former friend. He tells Monte he is sorry to hear of Martines death, and walks off. Perhaps trying to give Monte a choice to kill him or walk away. Monte, unable to shoot Shorty in the back as he walks away, pursues. Shorty makes a long shot with a pistol at Monte, but runs off when the shot only wounds Monte in the left side. Monte then manages to slip around Shorty and shoots him. As Shorty is dying, Monte tells him that he rode the wild bay horse.
Seven years pass and Monte returns from working all over the West. His friends have gotten older, prices are rising, and he is seen by the townspeople as a relic of another time. However, one little boy asks for lessons in roping. When the accountant who manages the lands he used to ranch drives his primitive car into a mud puddle and asks for help, Monte jumps his horse over the vehicle and rides away.

Tags: violence, murder

Review:
Yes, because "Monte Walsh" now joins my list of one of the five best westerns ever made; and, no, because at the tender age of 21, I would not have appreciated this masterpiece; which, in these especially troubled times, seems more relevant than ever.According to TCM host, Robert Osborne, William Fraker directed only 4 films during his distinguished career, preferring his role as director of photography.
"Monte Walsh" should be the role for which Marvin is remembered, as "Chet" should be the role to remember Jack Palance.
It is a reflective sensitive film, with the main character trying to come to terms with change.It deals with people and nature--fodder for good poetry.
This one has one of the finest songs I have heard "the good times are a'coming" by Mama Cass Elliot.I recommend this film and "Will Penny" as great unusual westerns that touch you if you appreciate good filmmaking--and do not evaluate a western by the action sequences..
One of the most touching and poignant westerns ever made, "Monte Walsh" is a love poem written to a way of life that only lasted about 20 years, but defined much of American culture.
The cowboy period only lasted from about 1865 to 1885, and this film shows several friends who have been cowboys for most of that time, deeply in love with their work, who see it all ending, and are powerless to stop it.
The wonderful theme song by Mama Cass Elliot "The Good Times Are Coming" is just marvelous, and perfect for the film.
This is a great film, primarily due to the metaphor near the end where Marvin tries to tame a horse, frustratingly attempting to control the nature of all things around him.
Lee Marvin heads an outstanding cast including Jack Palance, Jeanne Moreau and Mitchell Ryan in this elegant adaptation of the Jack Schaefer ("Shane") novel.
"Monte Walsh" offers a vision of a dying cowboy lifestyle, of large cattle corporations and fewer jobs, of the growth of towns and the death of rowdy freedoms, of hard lives and few attractive options.
Lee Marvin is at his rugged best in the title role with typical solid support from Jack Palance, who is excellent here cast against type.
When considering the acting career of Lee Marvin, the movie Monte Walsh must be included as an example of Lee Marvin at his best, Mr. Marvin gives a powerful, compelling and moving performance as an aging cowboy who has to deal with change.
So strong is his performance that he carries the entire movie, which, given the outstanding supporting cast, including Jack Palance, Jeanne Moreau, Jim Davis and Mitchell Ryan, is saying a lot.
Monte Walsh (1970)A large amount of Cowboy films or Westerns suffer from a cheesy song that either begins the show or ends it.
This song not only starts the picture, it repeats in the middle and ends it too.Apart from this terrible composition, Monte Walsh is an excellent, if gentle Cowboy film that shows the end of the Cowboy days in the face of corporate control of the "common" land.
The movie is really a character study of simple men facing an uncertain future and this is helped enormously by a wonderful cast and great performances by Lee Marvin and Jack Palance.Lee Marvin as usual commands the screen.
This is a far better movie than the shallow and more widely available 2003 remake starring the one-note Tom Selleck, even if it has a higher rating on IMDb.Monte Walsh (1970) is an unfairly neglected western..
Lee Marvin and JackPalance did as good a job of acting that I have ever seen them do.The supporting cast is full of wonderful career action characteractors who you would recognize if you watched a lot of films andTV in the '70's.
The way movie progresses noticed a lot of scenesseemed choppy and there must have been a lot left on the cuttingroom floor.Lee Marvin looked like he was playing his typical Marvin character,but Jack Palance was likeable and I believe did a better job andeven portrayed his character better than Carradine did in theremake and Carradine did a great job.
Lee Marvin is more melancholy in his approach to Monte Walsh, and as a result this version plays a bit more on the wistful side.
It is quite moving at times.Both films enjoy a sly sense of humor although this version is more subtle.John Barry's score supplies just a hint of the style he would later utilize for his epic Dances With Wolves.
Mama Cass sings her heart out on The Good Times are Coming Soon.Jack Palance plays wonderfully against type as the somewhat bashful Chet.Monte Walsh needs to be re-released as a proper DVD so we don't have to rely on inferior bootleg copies from eBay..
Sensitive Western with satisfying and impressive directorial by William A Fraker , in his film debut for this award-winning cinematographer , being based on Jack Schaefer's novel , author of ¨Shane¨ .
Monty Walsh (Lee Marvin) a veteran cowboy sees declining the ending days of Wild West era and the transition to a new century where horses are left .
Aging cowboy Monty is a good and professional man and embarks on mission to avenge his colleague .Moving and sensitive Western where the cowboys must say goodbye to the lives they know and some of them attempt to make a new upright start and others way to crime .
Moving Western , elegiac , subdued and worthwhile for genre lovers , including great Lee Marvin and Jack Palance in an unusual good guy character .
Great acting for all casting with magnificent main roles from Marvin as Monty who only lives his work and is enamored for a prostitute named Countess Martine and Jack Palance as his loyal friend .
Gray-haired cowboy Lee Marvin (as Monte Walsh) and sidekick Jack Palance (as Chet Rollins) arrive in the western town of "Harmony", looking for honest work.
Fraker takes "Monte Walsh" on a sometimes too leisurely pace; the film takes its sweet time, but pleases if you've got the patience.
That it's a post peak period western is ironically obvious as "Mama" Cass Elliott sings John Barry's theme "The Good Times Are Coming" (a minor "Easy Listening" hit).
If this is any indication, westerns didn't need to fade away as much as they needed to grow old gracefully.********* Monte Walsh (10/2/70) William A.
Fraker ~ Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, Jeanne Moreau, Mitchell Ryan.
It stars Lee Marvin (Monte Walsh) & Jack Palance (Chet Rollins) as two ageing cowboys who find that the era of the cowpoke is coming to an end; and that work for them is now very hard to come by.
Adapted by David Zelag Goodman & Lukas Heller from Jack Schaefer's novel, Monte Walsh is a gentle but astute telling of men who have outlived their time (think Will Penny/Ride The High Country).
Thus when the story takes its potent laced turns we are with them all the way, for better or worse.John Barry provides the music and the film opens with a delightful and ironic tune called "The Good Times Are Comin" sung by Mama Cass.
Monte Walsh is one of my favorite Lee Marvin films.
In this sad western, Lee plays a seasoned cowboy who must adjust to a changing West.
This is a poignant western about the decline of the cowboy and his way of life which has been told in several other films, but not quite as affecting as this one.
Lee Marvin and Jack Palance play off each other beautifully and one can feel the deep bond of friendship.
Whether Monte Walsh is one of the all-time greats of the Western genre I'm not sure.
William Fraker may have felt he was more comfortable as a cinematographer and he is perhaps more well-known for that, but his directing(his first and best) in Monte Walsh is most credible and does reiterate that he should have directed more films.
The film's song The Happy Times are Coming is a hauntingly beautiful song with a touch of irony and Momma Cass Elliot's singing of it is deeply felt and affecting.Also great about Monte Walsh is how well-written it is, with none of it feeling too wordy or meandering.
The acting is great, Lee Marvin commanding, noble and cool with a touch of steel, while Jack Palance has never been more restrained or moving with Chet being the most likable character of his career.
Jeanne Moreau is very touching, her eyes conveying a devastating effect.Overall, a wonderful film and you'd be hard pressed to find a Western with as much emotional punch(to me only The Shootist comes close).
He's simply wonderful as the title character, part of a romanticized Old West that can see that times are changing.
There's not as much need for veteran cowboys like him and his good friend Chet Rollins (Jack Palance), so they have a hard time finding work.
But making the acquaintance of short tempered Shorty Austin (Mitchell Ryan) will prove to be quite fateful indeed."Monte Walsh" is scripted by Lukas Heller and David Zelag Goodman, based on the novel by Jack Schaefer of "Shane" fame.
The music by John Barry is lush and romantic.The film also shows us just how great Jack Palance can be.
He and Marvin make for very believable friends, the lovely Moreau has much appeal, and Ryan (who's clearly playing younger than he actually was at the time) is a vivid antagonist.
And they're supported by many of the cream of the crop of American character actors: G.D. Spradlin, Michael Conrad, Bo Hopkins, John McLiam, Matt Clark, Billy Green Bush, Eric Christmas, Charles Tyner, Jack Colvin, and Richard Farnsworth.Well paced, with some good action, and violence that is effective without being particularly gory, "Monte Walsh" rates as a must see for fans of the cast and the Western genre.Filmed again in 2003, with Tom Selleck in the lead.Eight out of 10..
Its title character is played by Lee Marvin, (he was 46 when it was made), and his partner is Jack Palance, (who was 51), and the woman Monte loves is a French whore, (a lovely understated Jeanne Moreau).
Jobs for cowhands are drying up and old timers like Monte (Lee Marvin) and his friend, Chet (Jack Palance) are living anachronisms.
During the course of the film, not only is their way of life dying but all sorts of rotten things happen to the folks Monte loves and as they drop like flies, he's pretty much all alone.To heighten the effect of loneliness, the film has excellent melancholy music and is deliberately slow and brooding.
Another film that showed the changing and dying of the Old West in those aforementioned elegiac terms was the 1970 western MONTE WALSH.Set during turn of the 20th century, and based on the novel by Jack Schaefer, whose novel "Shane" was the basis for the classic 1953 western of the same name, MONTE WALSH stars Lee Marvin in the title role of an aging cowboy who, along with his longtime friend (Jack Palance), has been spending the winter on a cattle drive But more and more, Marvin and Palance are seeing the landscape become divided by barbed wire fences and the coming of the railroad; and opportunities for steady and gainful employment are becoming few and far between.
Indeed, Palance has designs on being a hardware store owner and marrying a widow (Allyn Ann McLerie); while Marvin carries on a relationship with a French woman (Jeanne Moreau, in her U.S. film debut).
Among the ranch hands that Marvin and Palance ride with is an impulsive wanna-be cowpoke (Mitchell Ryan, making his film debut), who is intent on breaking a wild stallion, and failing at every turn.
By the end, he is finally unemployed and more content to ride out into obsolescence, a trait echoed when he refuses to become part of some Wild West troupe, telling the promoter "I ain't spittin' on my whole life".William Fraker, one of Hollywood's great cinematographers (he had done the cinematography on two classic 1968 films, ROSEMARY'S BABY and BULLITT), made his debut in the director's chair with this impressive end-of-an-era sagebrush saga, capturing the wide open landscapes of the West (shot on locations in southern Arizona), and illustrating as well as anyone how rough a life it had to have been for the people of that era.
Marvin ends up alone and on his own in the melancholic coda.Featuring solid support from genre veterans like Matt Clark, Bo Hopkins, Charles Tyner, Michael Conrad, Richard Farnsworth, and Billy Green Bush, MONTE WALSH, though highly acclaimed and highly successful at the box office upon its release in October 1970, has largely been forgotten by most audiences who are not already fans of the Western genre, as indeed basically the entire genre itself has been in the 21st century.
I waited a long time to see 'Monte Walsh', from having seen the trailer when it first came out & thinking it did not look all that good.
Ex director of photography William Fraker tries his hand at his first directorial effort and John Barry's score adds some class to an otherwise 'should have been better' movie.A few reviewers tend to like this effort, and if you enjoy 70s American westerns this could entertain you.
Fraker's "Monte Walsh" is another bit of autumn Here commemorated is the end of the cattle demand, and its key personality Nothing in terms of Westerns can be deplorable than that Blessed with the best of beginnings, a novel by Jack Schaefer, who gave a similar sound basis for "Shane," this depressed, impressive picture is a requiem for the cowboy...
The cowboy superfluous and looking for a shop-keeping job; big business moving in from the East to rationalize; a cow town with an air of an early stage ghost town Any cowhand worth his coffee and beans could be forgiven for providing the thought: far better to go out in gun-blaze like the "Wild Bunch."There are violent happenings in "Monte Walsh," which had Arizona locations, but not violent-spectacular Controlled melancholy covers them as it does everything elseTwo grizzled characters, Lee Marvin and Jack Palance, who have both known better cow-punching times, ride into Harmony, another distant relative of the town portrayed in "Shane," and think themselves lucky to get jobs on an old ranch Among the new ranch hands is Mitch Ryan, who is determined to break a wild gray stallion The rheumy eye of Marvin still takes expert note Relaxation for the two aging cowboys consists of a saloon-gal for Marvin (Jeanne Moreau, making both her U.S. and Western debut) and a widow (Allyn Ann Mclerie) with a hardware store for Palance, who ultimately makes a choice for marrying the store ownerThe film is a realistic Western developed in an unhurried style with the emphasis on character and on the real drudgery of frontier life.
My favorite Lee Marvin role is the title role of the film Monte Walsh.
Lee and his friend Jack Palance are a couple of aging cowboys who are proud of the trade they have, but the demands for it are becoming fewer and fewer.Monte Walsh debuted two years after another film with the same themes, Will Penny brought great critical acclaim to Charlton Heston.
Heston and Marvin essayed the same kind of role, the aging cowboys who are finding less and less work for themselves as the years pass.Both Walsh and Penny practice their trade in the Brokeback Mountain country and you can bet that Ennis Delmar and Jack Twist when they got into town and went to the movies, really identified with both of these guys.
Ennis and Jack could easily be the descendants of both Heston and Marvin.Unlike Will Penny whose greatest challenge was with a bunch of renegade rawhiders, Monte Walsh has to deal with the death of his best friend at the hands of another he considered a friend.
Of course that was in an era when one could be proud of your labor and way of life.Fourteen years earlier Marvin supported Jack Palance in an excellent World War II film, Attack.
That's the movie business for you.Western veterans like G.D. Spradlin and Jim Davis support Marvin well.
There's a brief shot of Marvin returning to a town where he's had some raucous good times with old friends.
The cowboy way-of-life is quickly coming to an end, and Chet and Monte try to carve out a new life - with great difficulty.This movie has it all - authenticity, love, loyalty, and desperation.
Treat yourself to one of the best movies ever made starring Lee Marvin and Jack Palance.
The cowboy has never been underrepresented in film, but this masterpiece shows us with thrilling detail the personal struggles that came with the end of their way of life.
Lee Marvin portrays the title character, Jack Palance is his loyal friend and partner Chet Rollins.
The entire film pays tribute to a dying breed, the passing of the cowboy way of life, taking it's toll on those free and independent spirits who never had the time or inclination to just settle down.
It's that prevailing melancholy that pervades "Monte Walsh", the character and the movie, that makes it so difficult yet wonderful to watch.
Lee Marvin and Jack Palance are marvelous.
The great half is the first, where we meet cowboys dealing with a time when their world is coming to an end.
I was very disappointed in the way the film went.Often-cinematographer William Fraker takes the Director's Chair here and does admirably.
MONTE WALSH is one of the many 'death of the Old West' westerns to have come out over the years, with the most notable examples of the genre being THE WILD BUNCH and UNFORGIVEN.
He brings pathos and humour to the part, although I found the film's most valuable performer to be Jack Palance, cast against type as Marvin's buddy.