AllMovie

The Virginian, Owen Wister's classic Western novel, arguably the first nuanced treatment of the cowboy in American fiction, has had a long history as a source for adaptation. It was twice filmed as a silent film, then in 1929 as an early talkie with Gary Cooper, and then again in 1946 with Joel McCrea. In the 1960s, it became the basis for the first 90-minute TV series, with its hero (James Drury) employed by a series of bosses and its villain, Trampas (Doug McClure) a continuing character, his rough edges sanded down. This version, filmed for the TNT cable channel, returns to the book's set of characters, though with one omission, the "dude" narrator, a literary device that seems extraneous for dramatic presentation. Bill Pullman, who also directed and produced, is a stolid choice for the lead, and, although he is at least ten years older than the character was in the book, so is Diane Lane, who plays Molly, the schoolmarm he courts. For its first half, this version gets the windswept, treeless geography of southern Wyoming right, and then inevitably slips in towering mountains during the story's pursuit section. The film is strongest in reflecting Wister's view that frontier society was making things up as it went along (the story was set in 1885, five years before Wyoming gained statehood), showing shifting loyalties among the cowboys, the difficulties of enforcing the law in a literally wide open territory, and the consequences of vigilantism. The dialogue respects Wister's Victorian locutions without proving distracting. It's weaker in portraying Molly's character; here, she seems too quickly disillusioned with the difficulties of life on the frontier and then all too easily converted simply by the affectionate attentions of the Virginian. The fact is, neither the Cooper nor the McCrea film versions are among those actors's best performances nor their strongest Westerns, so Pullman and company should be given credit for largely respecting the material and giving it a handsome mounting.