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Very disappointing...

Absolutely Fantastic

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Joe Don Baker is my favorite actor(no, I'm really serious), and this is hands down his greatest film,at least out of all the films I've seen him in. The film is basically about a war between Buford Pusser( who was a real person, by the way) and the scum of a small town. Someone will kill a friend or family member of Pusser, and Pusser will kill one or two of the bad guys at a time. It's a shame Joe Don couldn't be in the sequels, remake, or TV show. I've heard pretty bad things about all of those, so I think I'll stay away from them. The ending is somewhat anti-climactic, but somehow effective. Definitely check this film out if you like Joe Don Baker and/ or action flicks.

Unfortunately the IMDb allows only comments up to 1000 words and I was so much taken in by WALKING TALL that my comment got longer, so please go to my entry in the message board, if you want to read the whole review! :-) ... :-)) I love movies with balls and brains and this is one of 'em! :-) OK, I know this movies has its small shortcomings, because it does not belong to the category of over-financed Hollywood-junk (which is a movie-category established by the film industry (!) in the later 80ies and beginning 90ties consisting of movies costing anywhere from 50 to 200 million bucks and which look like most designer-stuff: well crafted but hollow), but to the category of a small independently financed B-picture. Don't get me wrong, this ain't a movie financed on a shoestring-budget, this is just one of those movies, where the producers did not have million's to burn. It's very decently made and 95% perfect, just here or there you think, well, they could have tried one more take or something similar. But anyway, are you going to the cinema to see a technically perfect movie and receive joy from seeing designer-tailored action-scenes, or do you go to the movies or buy a DVD to enjoy yourself with a movie full of balls and brain? If you belong to the 1st category, I suggest you save the time reading this and forget about watching this flick. But if you belong to the later category, then this is something for you, you gonna enjoy this roller-coaster-flick! Especially if - as is the case with me - 70ies B-flicks are your cup of tea. They certainly are mine! I won't dwell here on the storyline of WALKING TALL (you can find details elsewhere here), it's probably enough to point out that the title is the program and that our hero's tag-line is "walk softly and carry a big stick" (or - as the old Latins said - "suaviter in modo, fortiter in re"). Yeah, that's what he does and he uses that big stick to clean house very properly. I do not know, which part of the story is actually "fact" (based on incidents in the life of Buford Pusser) and which parts are fiction (that could be a lot, since the disclaimer reads that this picture is based on "incidents suggested by the life of BP", which sounds like something, but in fact can mean nearly everything or nothing at all), but IF just 50% of the story-line happened in some way or another, this guy must have had enormous luck and 7 lives. Already the incidents, when somebody tries to kill him, amount to at least 5! The movie is quite brutal, at least for a flick made in the middle of the 70ies. Quite a lot of dead and quite a high number of severely beaten-up bodies, but there ain't that much of it on-screen. Just the first beating of our hero is really tense and was probably only outdone by Mel Gibson's Christ a couple decades later. Of course it looks a bit unrealistic to see Joe Don Baker in a T-shirt so soaked with blood, because anyone loosing that much of it would certainly be dead, but then again Phil Karlson had a point to make and wanted to make sure we'd get it: our hero had been severely wounded by the villains of the town and now he had a task to handle, do what a man has to do, simply WALK TALL! This movie is pure 70ies magnetism, a wonderful ride into rural Americana, with so many classic (partly stereo-)types, wonderful original characters, hardly any cardboard ones, and actors indeed looking like someone you could meet at any corner of such a town. This is what lifts such classic productions over the Hollywood-product we get today: we do see real people doing things, that could at least be possible (while when we watch Die Hard IV everybody should know that 90% of the action-scenes there could simply never happen, because they are against the laws of physics). Here you got a lot of beat-ups, car-chases, shoot-outs, more beatings, cars driving in houses, all things that normally don't happen if the police does its job, but things that COULD happen, that are physically possible. And they are staged with zest and verve by a veteran director in the twilight of his career, who took this job at the age of 66 and wanted to give it a last (which then was his penultimate) try. And he does deliver ALL the goods, pulls all triggers. He certainly knew this could very well be his last effort, so why not give the best. With 4 decades (!!) of movie-making experience, Phil Karlson (who also directed THE SILENCERS and THE WRECKING CREW-entries in the lovely Matt Helm-series and quite a couple very good noir's and western) certainly knew how to build up a good storyline and how to stage it as well as possible with whatever budget he had available. ...ATTENTION ! This comment here is NOT COMPLETE, because the IMDb allows only 1000 words and I wrote more, so please go to my entry in the message board (if you liked to read my few cents) to get the whole review and to be able to comment on it! :-)

I saw it when it came out, in Dunn North Carolina, mind you, in the new cinema complex that had just open in the new shopping mall that had started opening in 1970 (I bought a tie there, the tie of Campbell community college next door, in 1970). I thought it was interesting, fascinating, but maybe slightly extreme. I have not changed my mind. But what is it about? A man coming back to his birth place and his family, along with his wife, their two kids and their dog, a birth place they decide to call home, in Tennessee. I have seen that pattern so often like in "Sometimes they come back" by Stephen King. He is at once, on the very second day, face to face with the perversion prohibition can produce. The county, or at least the city, is anti-alcohol, anti-prostitution, anti-gambling, and what had to happen happens. Just beyond the county limits a bar cum bordello cum gambling hall opens and attracts the males of the county who want to be ripped of their money by cheating game masters, of their soberness by moonshine whisky unduly called Daniels and of their kinky dreams by trailer female visitors, go and have a good time. But this business is of course in the hands of hard traffickers, of some organized crime at least at the level of the whole state and anyone who opposes it is dead meat, but after it has been severely tenderized. Our hero decides to run as sheriff against the rotten one who is in place and the rotten racist local judge who is covering the whole business. And then it is the story of how he will learn how to do things, how to integrate a black man in his team, how to inspire courage and fight corruption, how to bust the facade of these traffickers, bust the heads of a couple as soon as they draw a weapon, and finally inspire the people to build a posse and go out for the Lucky Spot of their dreams and burn it down. True of course, but too extreme. Things never happen that way. It takes time, a lot of time, to move public opinion, particularly in a small town. It takes time and finesse to trick and trap mafia criminals. It takes time and patience to trick and trip a judge who has so much power in his hands. But in 1973 it was a sign on the road away from the good old silent majority. The very first step on a very long way that is just coming ripe right now, maybe, and the silent majority might finally get some voice and shout "Yes We can" to their desire for "the change they need". Will that be a landslide or a tottering stumble? The film seems to believe that such radical change is possible once the fruit is ripe. Yet it does not show the ripening of the fruit, just the plucking.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Remember seeing this film when it first hit the theatres in 1973...had some hype in the local newspapers and TV ads and was ballyhooed a lot like "The Exorcist" the same year. This film does not disappoint. If you like underdog films and the bad guys getting their a's kicked you will love this movie. Joe Don Baker, a bit actor at the time puts in slam dunk performance as the tough tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser who is a southern dirty harry type cop. Some fans might remember Baker as one of the prisoners in Paul Newman's "Cool Hand Luke". Story centers around Pusser returning home after a long sabbatical as a pro wrestler to find corruption running amok. After getting sliced and diced at a corrupt card table in the local septic tank bar and left for dead on the side of the road Pusser gets angry enough to make a run for sheriff....after winning the surprise election Pusser has to recruit some honest deputies - a rather hard task in that small corrupt town - and proceeds to try and weed out the gangsters and prostitutes running amok in the town. After running the corrupt judge into the basement of the local court house Pusser has to stop the moonshining operation run by the mob also. Along the way he literally castrates a corrupt deputy who is a mob informer. His preferred weapon is not a pistol but a big round wooden "stick" if you will he uses to bang up and batter down all criminals with. Gets to be sort of fun waiting for the next scumbag Pusser will pound down with that big wooden stick......scene of Pusser and his wife getting ambushed by the mob is very graphic and humbling...several people getting very teary eyed in the theatre the first time I saw this film. Scenes of Pusser and his children walking in funeral procession for his wife get to your emotions in a warm and tender way. Plenty of action, and the bad guys get mowed down in the end by Pusser. Almost like a carbon copy of the original Dirty Harry film the same year with Clint Eastwood mowing down the criminals. Poor cinematography and film editing the only downer for this film. Why does the viewer have to see part of a microphone hanging down from a bedroom?? Don't bother with the sequels without Baker as sheriff Pusser. Bo Svenson poor substitute after you have seen Baker as Pusser. Great overall action film - can be quite graphic. Not for young kids to see.