General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Monte Walsh

Monte Walsh is a 1970 American Western directed by William A. Fraker, starring Lee Marvin as an aging cowboy whose way of life is disappearing as ranches consolidate and Eastern capital moves into the West. It was adapted by Lukas Heller and David Z. Goodman from Jack Schaefer's 1963 novel of the same title, the author of Shane, and co-stars Jeanne Moreau and Jack Palance.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	7 October 1970, New York City and Los Angeles; distributed by National General Pictures¹
Director	William A. Fraker, in his feature directorial debut; he had been cinematographer on Rosemary's Baby, Bullitt, and Marvin's Paint Your Wagon¹^•²
Cast	Lee Marvin (Monte Walsh), Jeanne Moreau (Martine Bernard), Jack Palance (Chet Rollins), Mitch Ryan (Shorty Austin), Jim Davis (Cal Brennan)¹
Source	Novel Monte Walsh by Jack Warner Schaefer (Boston, 1963)¹
Budget	$4 million at announcement; a September 1969 report cited a final budget of $5 million¹
Music	Score by John Barry; title song "The Good Times Are Comin'" by Barry and Hal David, sung by Mama Cass¹
Remake	A 2003 television version starring Tom Selleck, directed by Simon Wincer³

Spoilers

Plot

In the late 1880s, Monte Walsh and Chet Rollins, two aging cowboys, ride into the town of Harmony, where ranch manager Cal Brennan offers them work at the Slash Y Ranch. There they meet their old friend Shorty Austin. In town, Monte pays a call at the saloon on Martine Bernard, the woman he is involved with there, while Chet woos Mary Eagle, a widowed owner of a hardware store left to her.¹

The economic setting drives the story. Many ranches have closed after a hard winter, and the rest have been sold to a large cattle company back east, leaving cowhands out of work across the region.⁴ After Shorty loses his job and kills a man in a saloon brawl who turns out to be a marshal, Chet marries Mary and settles into the hardware store, telling Monte that the day of the cowboy is gone. Martine has moved to the more prosperous saloon town of Charleyville; Monte follows her and proposes marriage. Leaving town, a drunken Monte tames a wild stallion from a Wild West show, refuses the owner's job offer because he is too proud to become a carnival attraction, and destroys a large part of the town on the horse during his ride.¹

The ending is bleak. Returning to Harmony, Monte learns that Chet was killed by Shorty during a robbery of the hardware store. He rides to Charleyville to find Martine dead and Shorty waiting for him; the two men stalk each other through the town until Monte kills Shorty.¹

Production history

The project changed hands several times before filming. Screen rights to Schaefer's novel were acquired in 1965 by producer-director Robert Aldrich, who planned the adaptation for Twentieth Century-Fox with Lukas Heller writing the screenplay; John Wayne was considered for the lead in early 1966. The project lapsed until early 1968, when CBS Films took it over for release by National General Pictures.¹

Lee Marvin was cast in the leading role for "$1,000,000 against 10% of the gross," and was given approval over the screenplay and director. In December 1968, Variety reported that William A. Fraker, who had been director of photography on Marvin's previous film Paint Your Wagon (1969), would make his feature directorial debut on the picture. Fraker promoted his own camera operator, David M. Walsh, to director of photography. The production was briefly re-titled The Die Hard (or The Diehard) before the name reverted to Monte Walsh.¹

Principal photography began on 2 June 1969 in Arizona, at a working ranch near Sonoita and on a western set near Benson built at a cost of $250,000; both sites were reported to be primed as tourist attractions. Nine weeks of location filming ended in early August 1969, a day after a windstorm leveled the western set, and six more weeks of shooting followed in Los Angeles. Nearly a year after the shoot, Marvin filmed a new ending, and John Barry set music to the new tag and rescored two other scenes.¹

Fraker and Marvin. A widely told production story concerns the first-time director's handling of his star's drinking. Early in the shoot, Fraker found Marvin standing on a rock in full costume holding a bottle of beer, canceled the day's shooting at six in the morning despite the expense, and told the actor the film would contain no frame in which the lead was "smashed." Fraker expected to be fired; instead the producers congratulated him, and Marvin reportedly never again showed up drunk on the set.²

The film also carried a legal aftermath: in January 1970 an Arizona Superior Court judge awarded Kenneth B. Callaway, a background actor, $45,000 for injuries suffered when a horse upturned a buggy he was seated in, with Columbia Broadcasting System and Palladian Pictures among the defendants.¹

Reception and place in the Western

The picture opened on 7 October 1970 in New York and Los Angeles to mixed reviews. Variety likened it to Will Penny (1968) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) as the latest film "to attempt meaningful exposition of the reality of an aging cowboy."¹ Critics split sharply: Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it four stars, calling it "as lovely a Western as I've seen in a long time" and praising Marvin's performance as among his best, while Gene Siskel rated it one star the same year.⁵^•⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 90% Tomatometer from 10 reviews.⁷

An elegiac Western. The film belongs to the wave of early-1970s Westerns about the end of the old West, falling between Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) and Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).² Richard Slotkin identified it, with Wild Rovers (1971) and The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972), as a subtype showing the cowboy as a common working man.⁸ Western Writers of America's survey of significant Westerns since 1970 credits it with cinematography "like a Frederic Remington or Charles Russell painting" and a fairly accurate depiction of working cowboys at the close of the open-range era.⁹ The Rotterdam festival program praised Fraker for "resisting the temptation to mythologise the Wild West" and called the film a classic Western without being as well known as other classics.⁴

Ebert read the film as a quieter, more thoughtful treatment of the same psychological moment as The Wild Bunch: mostly it sticks to ordinary life, the camaraderie of the bunkhouse and range, and the shy love between the cowboy and the prostitute, and he judged it possibly the first three-handkerchief Western.⁵

Remake and afterlife

A 2003 made-for-television remake, also titled Monte Walsh, starred Tom Selleck as a cowboy fighting Eastern corporations buying Western land, with Isabella Rossellini as Martine; it was directed by Simon Wincer and runs about two hours.³ Ted Mahar called the 2003 version one of the best Westerns of the last quarter-century.¹⁰ The 1970 film reached home video on VHS in 1998 through Fox Home Entertainment and on Blu-ray from Kino in 2015 in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio.¹¹^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1961 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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