INSP will present five films featuring one of our favorite cowboys this weekend.
C&I reader favorite Sam Elliott will celebrate his 77th birthday on Monday — and INSP is giving his fans an early present with a weekend marathon of his movies.
Here’s the lineup:
The Shadow Riders (1982)
Three years after The Sacketts aired, Elliott reunited with Tom Selleck, Jeff Osterhage and Ben Johnson for a second (but unrelated) Louis L’Amour adaptation. Two brothers (Selleck, Elliott) break their rascally uncle (Johnson) out of prison to help them find their kidnapped siblings, who have been taken prisoner by a slave-trading ex-Confederate officer (Geoffrey Lewis). The action is fast and furious under the direction of veteran Western filmmaker Andrew V. McLaglen (McClintock!). (8 pm ET Friday. Also, 1 am Aug. 9)
The Sacketts (1979)
Elliott is a standout in this leisurely paced but dramatically satisfying two-part miniseries based on two novels — The Daybreakers and Sackett — by the great Louis L’Amour. Three Tennessee brothers — Tell (Elliott), Orrin (Tom Selleck) and Tyrel Sackett (Jeff Osterhage) — head West after the Civil War, hoping to make their fortune and, if they’re lucky, avoid trouble. But trouble goes looking for them when they become embroiled in a land dispute between Mexicans and Anglos in Santa Fe. The terrific supporting cast includes such notables as Glenn Ford, Ben Johnson, Gilbert Roland, Jack Elam and Slim Pickens. (8 pm ET Saturday. Also, 8 pm ET Aug. 22)
You Know My Name (1999)
Bill Tilghman (played, masterfully, by Elliott), a real-life lawman who once enforced rough justice alongside Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, is the focus of this fact-based drama about Tilghman’s late-career efforts to bring order to “the most sinful town in America” — Cromwell, Oklahoma — in the 1920s. Standing in his way: Wiley Lynn (Arliss Howard), a corrupt federal agent who doesn’t aim to please. Western movie fans, take note: You Know My Name also depicts Tilghman’s attempt to establish himself as a filmmaker with The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws (1915), a “realistic” Wild West in which he portrayed himself. (2 pm ET Sunday.)
Conagher (1991)
In another Louis L’Amour adaptation, which he co-wrote with wife and co-star Katharine Ross, Elliott is dead solid perfect as Conn Conagher, a graying but gutsy cowpuncher who can handle himself in any kind of fight, but usually prefers to walk away from trouble. (“Any man who kills when he can do otherwise,” he gravely notes, “is crazy. Plumb crazy.”) Unfortunately, trouble has a way of riding after Conagher, especially when he sides with an elderly cattle rancher (Ken Curtis of Gunsmoke fame) who’s beset by rustlers. Conagher occasionally feels like an abridged version of a miniseries. Even so, there’s something deeply affecting about the tentative romance that slowly develops between Conagher and a lonely widow (Ross) raising two children on a remote homestead. (8 pm ET Sunday. Also: 8 pm ET Aug. 20 and 2 pm ET Aug. 29.)
Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009)
OK, we know: This isn’t a western. But Elliott does play a small-town sheriff in this lightweight comedy-thriller, which pivots on the cultural clashes faced by a New York couple (Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker) forced to hide out in Wyoming under the Witness Relocation Program after witnessing a murder. Elliott is the local lawman who, along with his deputy wife (Mary Steenburgen), must keep watch on the undercover visitors. The movie received mixed reviews, but New York Times critic Stephen Holden admiring described Elliott as “everybody’s senior-cowboy fantasy: the Marlboro man three decades later, still oozing laid-back virility.” Sounds right to us. (10:30 pm ET Sunday.)