The three hour plus two part mini-series was just about the right time that was needed for Louis L'Amour to tell his tale about the Sacketts. His fictional family encompassed a few of his many western novels and the ground covered here is covered in two of his stories.One brother Sam Elliott has already gone west and now Tom Selleck and Jeff Osterhage have to go west because of a killing of a family member who have a feud going with the Sacketts. Their mother played by Mercedes McCambridge sends the boys off with her blessing and a promise that they'll send for her when they can.One thing I liked about this film is without being sanctimonious or preachy The Sacketts does manage convey the strong moral values the men were raised with. That slips all too often in the rough and violent west when it could become a dog eat dog matter of survival.Elliott is involved with prospecting and he runs afoul of a band of brothers named Bigelow when Elliott shoots one of them for being a card cheat. Selleck and Osterhage sign on to a cattle drive that is ramrodded by Glenn Ford who is wise in frontier ways. They settle in Santa Fe where they get caught in the middle of a feud between the new American immigrants led by John Vernon who includes among them a number of gunfighters and Gilbert Roland leader of the Mexican settlers who were there before.Let's say that the brothers help each other out in their different situations.A lot of familiar western names support Selleck, Elliott, and Osterhage and it's always a pleasure to see any one of them in a film. Ben Johnson plays another grizzled veteran of the frontier. Glenn Ford's character is probably the most morally ambiguous of the lot and in his long career Ford did play a few people who were not heroes, Lust For Gold and The Man From Colorado come immediately to mind. And Mercedes McCambridge's few scenes at the beginning are memorable. Fans of Louis L'Amour novels and western fans in general will enjoy The Sacketts

The Sacketts was fun to watch if you like actors like Tom Selleck, Sam Elliot, Ben Johnson and Glenn Ford. Other than having a great cast, there's nothing ground-breaking here. In fact this film at times seems a little bit too casually made, as if they were just trying to throw it together, collect their paycheck, and move on to the next project.There are a number of things that are distractingly bad in this film, and here are a few that I noticed.1. When they are on the cattle drive, they send Tyrell ahead to scout out water for the horses. Tyrell says he doesn't know the country, but they send him anyway. Tyrell finally does find water. A minute later he's under gunfire from rustlers who want to stampede the herd. Two minutes after that, the owner of the herd himself shows up saying that he came when he heard gunshots. Was Tyrell only scouting a half mile ahead of the herd? 2. Glenn Ford's death scene was really awful. By the position he was laying in, it would have been more practical for his hand to fall against his chest and his eyes to just glaze over. Instead, he went for the dramatic effect of twitching his head to the side and closing his eyes while pulling his hand from Selleck's and tossing it to the ground.3. The scene where Tell Sackett goes to cut the bad guys' horses loose. It was supposed to be the middle of the night, yet it was broad daylight outside. Oh, but they had the sound of whippoorwills dubbed in to fool us. Unfortunately the fact that it was not the slightest bit dark kind of tipped me off, unless they somehow made their camp fire strong enough to light up the whole valley.

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.

....you know, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Jack Elam, Sam Elliot, Shug Fisher, James Gammons, etc etc LQ Jones etc. Episodic kinda nature of the show keeps your interest, esp. when you see Sam Elliot come onto the screen. Nothing ground breaking, but check it out if you like either L'amour or Tom Selleck at the least.*** outta ****.