This is pretty much standard Western fare with a cattle drive, gold prospecting, town taming and gun play. Sam Elliot, Tom Selleck and Jeff Osterhage play the three Sackett brothers. The oldest one, Tell (Elliot) is the one looking for gold. In the meantime, the other two leave their home in Tennessee and head west, hooking up with a cattle drive. When the cattle are delivered, they head to racially divided Santa Fe to help a beautiful Mexican senorita whose family is threatened by a dishonest businessman.Much of the strength of this story lies in the supporting cast, including Western veterans Glenn Ford, Ben Johnson, Jack Elam, Slim Pickens and Gene Evans. Ford is Tom Sunday, ramrod of the cattle drive. He and the two younger Sacketts go into business together rounding up stray cattle before taking them to Santa Fe. Then Sunday's relationship with the Sackett boys begins to spiral downward, and when Orrin (Selleck) gets the sheriff job Sunday has his heart set on, a grudge develops that will not abate. Ben Johnson is a hoot as Cap Roundtree. He was going to join in the stray cattle venture, but when he meets up with Tell, his eyes light up with gold fever and off they go to the mountains. Elam, Pickens and Evans are the Bigelows. They aim to get revenge against Tell for the slaying of their brother and this leads to the final confrontation. Elam, with his long handlebar mustache and black garb, including gloves, looks especially menacing.The Sacketts is not the best Western to come along, but it is always a pleasure to watch those guys who appeared in so many of the bygone classics and have since passed on.

This COULD have been a very good film. Nice, strong themes running thru it, but none are really developed. Great cast, but it suffers from very weak direction and gaffs that are simply too serious to ignore.Let's list just a few of the glaring mistakes in the film.1) When the two younger Sacketts are traveling from Texas toward Santa Fe in the first part of the two part series, they are shown amid lots of saguaro cactus. Problem with this is that the saguaro cactus ONLY grows in the Sonoran desert, which is in Arizona, extreme southeast California and the northwest part of Mexico right below Arizona. No such cactus grown in Texas or in NE New Mexico where they were supposed to have been at the time. ANYONE spending any time in Arizona would know this, and anyone in New Mexico or Texas would know that cactus is not there.2) The film was set in 1869 and the year or two before, but the rifles most of the men used in the film were Winchester repeating rifles that were not produced until 1870 and later. But that was a small error compared to the fact that the rifle only holds (I believe) 7 cartridges, though the movie had some of the characters firing about 15 rounds before needing to reload.3) The climactic gunfight at the end of the movie is supposed to be set at "daybreak," though the shadows are all over the place, some of them clearly when the sun is on the horizon and then seconds later when the sun is nearly straight overhead and then back to on the horizon and then back to straight overhead.4) That same climactic gunfight has the three Sackett brothers and a wounded friend facing off against the three Bigelow brothers and four hired gunmen... but the Sacketts kill eight of them. Only seven bad guys there, but the Sacketts kill eight.Now, none of those errors are so serious as to destroy the film if the movie had otherwise been well-made and story lines developed and themes worked within it... but they were not. A terrible waste of some excellent acting talent.

I thought with my two favorite actors, Sam Elliott & Tom Selleck, it had to be a winner. We rented the DVD's which had a part 1 & part 2. After the first 15 minutes I was ready to shut it off. I've never seen such a slow moving western in my entire life. I gave up after the first DVD, not caring who lived or died in the rest of this movie. Even with the great cast, the acting was wooden, the scenes were predictable and it was just plain boring.It starts out in Tennessee with two brothers Orrin & Tyrell. Within the first 5 minutes Orrin (played by Tom Selleck)Sackett's bride-to-be is killed at the ceremony and Orrin's brother Ty shoots the man "Higgins" (remember Magnum P.I.'s character Higgins?). Naturally Higgins brother is going to come after Ty (yawn) so he heads out west which he eventually hooks up with Orrin who has also left TN. They become cowboys and the rest is too mind numbing to even recall. What a disappointment!

I really felt sorry for some of the classic western actors who ended up participating in this drivel. The whole thing seemed like it was written, directed and edited by a bunch of eighth-graders! It also seemed that it might have been severely edited to reduce the running time, and if that's the case, my criticism might be bit too harsh. Was this perhaps originally a 6-hour movie that was cut down to 4 hours?I can't believe that, at the time this is being written, that IMDb readers have given this an average rating of 7.5. I'm giving it a 1 in hopes that others will too to keep serious movie-watchers from wasting four hours of their time as I did last night.