This Savage Land

Widower Barry Sullivan takes his parents and children out west to make them a new life. Along the way they encounter such hardships as bandits led by George C. Scott, an obdurate land, and lovely Kathryn Hays.

It's a TV movie, edited from THE ROAD WEST, the series that ran for a single season in 1966 and 1967. This turned up as a two-part show a couple of years later on NBC. It offers itself as an ambitious effort, with some interesting talent, but it looks like a typical effort of the era, a family saga like THE BIG VALLEY, part soap opera, part western. With the visuals and music by Leonard Rosenman,filled with the standard sounds of the era, when the movie western was all but dead and the TV western in decline. In the end, if you enjoy this sort of thing, you'll enjoy this a lot. Me, I found the racketing from action to love story uneven; the editing of more than 22 hours of showtime down to a hundred minutes made the plot seem rushed and uneven.