Wonderful character development!

Just what I expected

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Tom Sellack as Orrin Sackett (the learned one) and Sam Elliot as as the oldest brother Tell (the toughest one). Jeff Osterhage is a very pleasant surprise as the youngest brother, Tyrel, (good with a gun to say the least). Any movie with Tom Sellack and Sam Elliot in it is bound to be good in my opinion.I am really surprised by how closely the movie actually follows the book. It tracked the book very closely. Ben Johnson as the old timer is very good, but then he almost almost has been. The fact that he was first a champion rodeo star makes his roles even better. Glen Ford plays Tom Sunday and while he educates the three Sackett brothers he is destined to die by one of them. Not in this movie but later down the line. This is a very well done movie.

The Sacketts was fun to watch if you like actors like Tom Selleck, Sam Elliot, Ben Johnson and Glenn Ford. Other than having a great cast, there's nothing ground-breaking here. In fact this film at times seems a little bit too casually made, as if they were just trying to throw it together, collect their paycheck, and move on to the next project.There are a number of things that are distractingly bad in this film, and here are a few that I noticed.1. When they are on the cattle drive, they send Tyrell ahead to scout out water for the horses. Tyrell says he doesn't know the country, but they send him anyway. Tyrell finally does find water. A minute later he's under gunfire from rustlers who want to stampede the herd. Two minutes after that, the owner of the herd himself shows up saying that he came when he heard gunshots. Was Tyrell only scouting a half mile ahead of the herd? 2. Glenn Ford's death scene was really awful. By the position he was laying in, it would have been more practical for his hand to fall against his chest and his eyes to just glaze over. Instead, he went for the dramatic effect of twitching his head to the side and closing his eyes while pulling his hand from Selleck's and tossing it to the ground.3. The scene where Tell Sackett goes to cut the bad guys' horses loose. It was supposed to be the middle of the night, yet it was broad daylight outside. Oh, but they had the sound of whippoorwills dubbed in to fool us. Unfortunately the fact that it was not the slightest bit dark kind of tipped me off, unless they somehow made their camp fire strong enough to light up the whole valley.

This COULD have been a very good film. Nice, strong themes running thru it, but none are really developed. Great cast, but it suffers from very weak direction and gaffs that are simply too serious to ignore.Let's list just a few of the glaring mistakes in the film.1) When the two younger Sacketts are traveling from Texas toward Santa Fe in the first part of the two part series, they are shown amid lots of saguaro cactus. Problem with this is that the saguaro cactus ONLY grows in the Sonoran desert, which is in Arizona, extreme southeast California and the northwest part of Mexico right below Arizona. No such cactus grown in Texas or in NE New Mexico where they were supposed to have been at the time. ANYONE spending any time in Arizona would know this, and anyone in New Mexico or Texas would know that cactus is not there.2) The film was set in 1869 and the year or two before, but the rifles most of the men used in the film were Winchester repeating rifles that were not produced until 1870 and later. But that was a small error compared to the fact that the rifle only holds (I believe) 7 cartridges, though the movie had some of the characters firing about 15 rounds before needing to reload.3) The climactic gunfight at the end of the movie is supposed to be set at "daybreak," though the shadows are all over the place, some of them clearly when the sun is on the horizon and then seconds later when the sun is nearly straight overhead and then back to on the horizon and then back to straight overhead.4) That same climactic gunfight has the three Sackett brothers and a wounded friend facing off against the three Bigelow brothers and four hired gunmen... but the Sacketts kill eight of them. Only seven bad guys there, but the Sacketts kill eight.Now, none of those errors are so serious as to destroy the film if the movie had otherwise been well-made and story lines developed and themes worked within it... but they were not. A terrible waste of some excellent acting talent.

It was probably OK as a TV movie back in 1979, but not that great to watch today.My biggest laugh was after Ben Johnson gets shot in the leg, he was using a makeshift crutch on the wrong side! It has some very good actors that have been in some solid movies, and it contains some strong moral themes but it just doesn't work. Also watch for Glenn Ford pull on a door that opens outwards; I guess they didn't have either the time or the budget to re-shoot such goofs.Even the music dates the movie. It sounds like some of it has been lifted from Kung Fu!