Watch Tom Horn For Free

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

"Tom Horn" is Steve McQueen's second to last film. I saw some folks call it his penultimate movie--which is true, but how many people know that penultimate means the same as second to last?! In the movie, he plays a real life character--a gunman in the west that was a hired gun and reportedly killed a lot of people. However, when he's hired by a cattlemen's association to stop rustling and chase sheep herders of the land, he's way too good at it and kills quite a few folks. Because of this, it caused bad publicity and a desire to hang him as a scapegoat--at least that's what you see in the film. In reality, there's quite a bit of debate as to whether or not Horn was guilty, though there did seem to be a bit of a rush to judgment considering that the evidence against him was minimal. This is a rather straight-forward sort of film. It is pretty violent at times and has some slow moments, but otherwise it's well made and interesting. Not a great film but a very good one.

"Let me ask you something...Are you really Tom Horn?"The question might as well be "Are you really Steve McQueen", as it's really him lying beaten in a horse stall to whom Richard Farnsworth asks the question, in this sad, bedraggled Western farewell both to the celebrated bounty hunter and to the Hollywood legend who plays him here. "Tom Horn" was McQueen's first action-hero role in over five years, and though he would play another bounty hunter just a few short weeks later in his last film, "The Hunter", this feels oh too much like his goodbye.It's a sad film, too much so by my lights. "I'm kind of raggedy", Horn explains early on, and he certainly is, with mottled skin and a bad case of hat hair. McQueen has discarded his crown as "King Of Cool", and it is a bit awkward seeing him so discomfited, even if his off-center performance gives "Tom Horn" nearly all the spark it has.Horn is a throwback to the old West, who in the dawn of the 20th century is hired to do away with some cattle rustlers plaguing a community. "Two hundred dollars for every rustler that goes somewhere else to ply his trade," and that includes Valhalla as Farnsworth's rancher puts it to Horn, no shy one when it comes to giving a varmit what's what.Horn's mistake is taking the ranchers at their word. After a long middle section of bloodshed, Horn is viewed by the ranchers as a violent liability. A boy is murdered, and Horn charged with the crime. The film then becomes a long, slow waltz, between Horn on one end and the gallows on the other.The film is credited to director William Wiard, though Mike Sutton of DVD Times and TrevorAclea on this site say it was McQueen himself at the helm, jumping in after firing more seasoned directors. It's hard to imagine a non-actor director spending so much time with Horn in the jail cell. The film has a bad case of the slows, and does a weak job with the facts of the case. Whether Horn really did murder the boy in question seems in doubt, but McQueen's character allows for no explanation, a strange and frustrating stance for an innocent man to take."I'm a little bored," Horn says. "You're gonna do what you have to do."This may be an effort to allow that the real Horn was no hero but a decidedly ornery cuss who might have been a cold-blooded murderer when all was said and done. But the film tries to have it both ways, both the edge of the outlaw and the rooting interest of a persecuted, innocent underdog. It is a forced situation, and a lame result, even with McQueen giving us some moments of real humor and empathy to make us want to like the film more.McQueen saves his best moments for the end when his parting words to Slim Pickens have painful resonance. Pickens is good, too, and so is a surprisingly effective Linda Evans, well into her thirties but oozing lambent sex appeal as a schoolteacher who becomes Horn's love interest.Why she leaves him, witnessed in a series of flashbacks, is another of "Tom Horn's" unresolved curiosities. It's a film you want to love, especially if you are a McQueen fan, but it's not a film anyone would remember if McQueen had been given a reprieve from his fatal bout with cancer. It's barely a film people remember in any event, which speaks to its failings as well as anything I could say.

This idea must have sounded good over lines and drinks in pre-production.Mostly an uninspired retread of a standard Western formula - "a man of the old west trying to live in the new," as Linda Evans bluntly rasps in one of the awkward love scenes. The wild frontiersman clashing tragically with the very civilization he made possible - this conceit underlay many good Westerns; not much of Hawks or Mann, but some of Ford and Hathaway, most of Eastwood and Penn, and all of Peckinpah. The elements of the formula are durable, and scenery goes a long way. Unfortunately the bad habits William Wiard learned in 70s TV - not a stylistic golden age for the medium - fatally cripple this, perhaps his only bigscreen attempt. Unnecessary zooms and irritating fades dominate the look of the movie, which otherwise suffers from questionable editing, uneven performances, sporadic dialogue, and poor storytelling generally.McQueen was dying, and looks it, and it's perfect for the part. He walks as if he's just been thrown from a saddle, but his hands still work, and his eyes are heavy with experience. He is as good here as he ever was, but as usual, in the scenes where he isn't on a horse or handling some tool (rope, gun, whiskey glass) he is less interesting. This stupid movie locks him in jail for almost half the running time. Denzel Washington had this problem in the nineties, playing a series of crippled or incarcerated leads, a moderate waste in his case but a national crisis with McQueen, who only lives when he's moving. "Papillon" also mostly sucks for this reason. The opening of "The Getaway" is the best prison use of McQueen's restless energy, pressure building up to violence later when he gets sprung. "Tom Horn" takes a wrong dramatic turn when it follows its few action scenes with a long, dull mope behind bars.Tom McGuane, Bud Shrake and Tom Horn himself, channeled through his autobiography, are credited with the story and script; I suspect that most of the good dialogue was McGuane's, but there are issues not usually associated with his writing. Especially atypical of McGuane, his main character's words never betray any kind of... character. Of course, "Bullitt" has a terrible story, and "The Getaway" is just a two-hour chase sequence, and they run fine on the smoke of McQueen's tires, as effectively driven by good directors.So it is, ultimately, Wiard who queers this picture; but sometimes the writing and direction collaborate to offer a really frustrating experience. The scene with Jim Corbett and Horn in the bar is a choice example - it's a Western, for Christ's sake. Show the brawl. Wiard wants an elegy, a la "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" or "Cable Hogue," but Peckinpah learned to direct on "Gunsmoke" and "The Rifleman." Wiard helmed that saccharine standard, "Bonanza," before graduating to "Love, American Style." In the writers' and director's defense, McQueen was a notoriously difficult fellow to work for, and certainly by the last couple of pictures his Solar company was largely dominating his productions. Therefore it is possible that his famous ego was responsible for some of what is wrong with this one. But very few of his movies, after he became a star anyway, are this bad.Richard Farnsworth is cast to type, and Linda Evans performs apparently while suffering from laryngitis. Nobody else is worth mentioning except Elisha Cook Jr and Slim Pickens, both of whom have been in much better company, and several terrified and badly injured horses, who must have had to be shot after making this bad time possible.

Saw the movie last nite for the second time in my life. Always been a big McQueen fan. This really is his first lead in a western since Nevada Smith. Slim Pickens is on hand again in a small role ( post The Getaway) and 180 degrees from One Eyed Jacks. Linda Evans is eye candy but won't stand by her man. Richard Farnsworth does a nice turn as a cattleman set up by his associates to screw the stock detective that is Tom Horn. These oldtimers sure put a lot of faith in a man's word or his handshake. No contracts back then. Horn is a man living and dying by his own rules. Fed up with what he has become and abandoned by the woman who could give him reason to go on, he accepts his punishment. That I believe answers the question why he won't put up a fight against the heinous murder charges he faces. Thank goodness it now usually takes forensic evidence to convict a man of murder. A fitting end of a career is this western role for Steve.