Plenty of scraps for the starving Western fan, from the table of Simon Wincer, the Australian director who had provided a near feast of such scraps (amid much bloatedness and waste) in the eight-hour TV miniseries, Lonesome Dove. The presence of a post-Civil-War American marksman in the Australian Outback feels like a bit of a gimmick: something to rope in the non-Western fan without making him feel too terribly atavistic. And only a very poor movie-watcher would attempt to add to his Western scrap-pile by pretending as though the Aborigines are Apaches: the Australian policy of "pacification by force" would make an interesting history lesson in its own right, but to bring this up simply as an opportunity to color our egalitarian hero as a Great Emancipator, a globe-trotting and gun-toting Abe Lincoln, muddies all potential parallels to race relations in the Wild West. (There are plenty of scraps here too, let it be said, for the Yankee chauvinist.) Still, once the shooting starts, or is about to start, the Western fan can block out distractions and drink deep of those abstract pleasures of space and spatial relationships at which no other art form can hope to compete. The sense of space, in one way, is a dictate of the plot: the hero has come to Australia with a custom-modified Sharps rifle whose range of accuracy has been lengthened to something approximating heavy artillery. It's almost as though the whole movie were an amplification of that stand-out scene in Lonesome Dove when Robert Duvall, from behind his dead horse on an open plain, routs a group of hostiles who believe they are safely out of rifle range. Tom Selleck, Laura San Giacomo, Alan Rickman. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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