A family leaves city life to take possession of a Wyoming ranch.
1970-12-16
N/A
100 min
Uprooted from their comfortable home in Pennsylvania, James and Kate Tanner, along with their sons, Virgil and Andy, journey to the wild country of 1890s Wyoming to become farmers. Soon, they come face-to-face with tornadoes, bears and wolves. But through the hardships their love for each other endures, even when a local rancher sees the newcomers as "squatters" on his land, and will stop at nothing – including murder – to drive them out.
It ends nicely enough, but everything up until that point is underwhelming.
A lot happens in <em>'The Wild Country'</em>, most of which negatively affects the protagonists. Despite that, I never really felt connected to the story and/or characters. The dialogue and behaviour for the latter is rather iffy.
Steve Forrest does a solid enough job in the role of Jim, though his wife (Vera Miles) and kids (Ron Howard, yes him, + Clint Howard) are more annoying than anything else. Jack Elam is mildly enjoyable as Thompson. Morgan Woodward plays antagonist Ab Cross, he is very one-dimensional in how he is and we don't really get any background on him either.
The plot surrounding Cross and the others is alright, just poorly executed in my opinion. It kinda felt like bad event followed by shouting followed by bad event followed by shouting all the time. There is one tornado scene which is very well shot, I will say that.
Overall, this isn't one I'd say you should rush to watch.
