As a boy, I never liked western films. My father loved them all, all the John Wayne classics, the Spaghetti Westerns, the whole lot.
I despised them all. They were all the same. Same plot. Same rotten cinematography. Same unbelievable characters. Couldn't understand the attraction.
Then I saw Lonesome Dove. This film (actually a mini-series) is an absolute masterpiece.
It starts with the cinematography and locations. It was not your stereotypical Utah-canyon photography, it was the great plains, the Texas deserts, the wide rivers, the mesquite groves. Not marvelous vistas, but simple, real, gritty scenery. You can taste the dust of the panhandle and smell the Kansas plains.
Then there's the action. There's lots of it. Flooding rivers, driving rains, realistic fights, thundering cattle drives, horrible scenes of rape and torture (just under TV censor radar), plenty of death and sadness. All of it believable. All of it heart-tugging. All of it amazing.
But above all of these great features are the characters and the writing. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call have become two icons of pop culture, polar opposites who work well together and, in the end, are incomplete without one another. The supporting cast as well is fabulous, well written, patently interesting, and tremendously played. Even the evil characters are fascinating.
This is what television and film should be. It is very, very rare for anything of this quality to ever appear on the small screen, and with today's "reality TV" craze, it is even rarer still.
Buy the DVD set. You won't be disappointed. 10 out of 10.
Barky
