AllMovie

In early October of 1892, the Dalton Gang, led by Bob Dalton (Robert Conrad), who had been robbing trains successfully for the previous two years, attempted to branch out into bank robbery by hitting two banks at once in the town of Coffeyville, Kansas. This quasi-docu-drama account recreates this event, one of the last incidents of its kind in the soon-to-be-tamed "wild west" -- the producers and screenwriters (including noted film noir expert Steve Fisher) felt compelled to add a fictional hero in ex-gunman Will Spence, played by Richard Widmark; but a lot of the other personalities represented, including town marshal Charles Connelly (Gene Evans), who died in the raid, were real people. As a made-for-TV movie The Last Day has an exceptionally strong cast, led by Widmark, Conrad, and Evans with Barbara Rush, Christopher Connelly, Richard Jaeckel, Tom Serritt, Morgan Woodward, and Tim Matheson. It obviously also owes quite a bit to Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid (1972), but the action and the performances are good enough to stand on their own merits, at least in the context of a made-fot-television feature.