Comes a Horseman

Handsome but overly studied. [09 Mar 1986, p.5]

Visually superb, though: a doomed attempt to make Fordian metaphors speak a language of corrupting, intimate anxiety.

So self-conscious about its themes that nothing in the storytelling occurs naturally.

Each new attempt to revive the Western seems to plunge the patient into a deeper coma. Arriving on the heels of Jack Nicholson's Goin' South, Alan J. Pakula's cataleptic Comes a Horseman suggests a conspiracy to kick the poor old Western while it's down. [25 Oct 1978, p.D13]

[Pakula] has made the dreary mistake of reducing a half-dead genre to its basic elements, stripping away color, detail, humor--everything that makes it possible to regard a Western as a pleasure rather than an ordeal. [13 Nov 1978, p.128]

Alan Pakula’s Comes a Horseman is so lethargic not even Jane Fonda, James Caan and Jason Robards can bring excitement to this artific- ially dramatic story of a stubborn rancher who won’t surrender to the local land baron.

Director Alan Pakula's sympathies seem to lie in the landscape, never less than exquisitely framed. But even this mute star can't fill the space left by dour performances.