"Monte Walsh" is a very slow, deliberate and meandering sort of film. It's really quite lovely but also a bit thin when it comes to plot.

The film is set in the waning days of the old west. Jobs for cowhands are drying up and old timers like Monte (Lee Marvin) and his friend, Chet (Jack Palance) are living anachronisms. During the course of the film, not only is their way of life dying but all sorts of rotten things happen to the folks Monte loves and as they drop like flies, he's pretty much all alone.

To heighten the effect of loneliness, the film has excellent melancholy music and is deliberately slow and brooding. It works but might annoy some viewers who want a lot of action. Well, until near the end there ain't any....so deal with it! Worth seeing despite being a bit depressing and slow.

Whether Monte Walsh is one of the all-time greats of the Western genre I'm not sure. But it is certainly a personal favourite, and has a big emotional impact in a way that few other Westerns have, with the exception of perhaps The Shootist.

It's beautifully photographed with an appealing graininess reminiscent of something like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Some shots are also almost painterly and the costumes are sets are equally handsome and evocative, maybe lacking the grandeur of Monument Valley for example but no less striking. William Fraker may have felt he was more comfortable as a cinematographer and he is perhaps more well-known for that, but his directing(his first and best) in Monte Walsh is most credible and does reiterate that he should have directed more films. John Barry, one of the greatest film composers who rarely put a foot wrong, couldn't have been a more ideal choice for composer, and his score here is wonderful, sweeping and elegiac. The film's song The Happy Times are Coming is a hauntingly beautiful song with a touch of irony and Momma Cass Elliot's singing of it is deeply felt and affecting.

Also great about Monte Walsh is how well-written it is, with none of it feeling too wordy or meandering. The very poetic in tone script is both light-hearted and heart-wrenching and some of the metaphors really makes one contemplate afterwards. It also develops the characters remarkably, the characters could have been just stereotypes but here they just felt so real and easy to identify with, and I completely believed in the agreeable chemistry between Monte and Chet and the subtly touching one between Monte and Martine. The story, which is easy to follow and beautifully told, has a warm-hearted, poetic touch at first but becomes very elegiac that is both haunting and poignant, not in a manipulative or cloying way but in a genuine way and it does not feel like two different films. The acting is great, Lee Marvin commanding, noble and cool with a touch of steel, while Jack Palance has never been more restrained or moving with Chet being the most likable character of his career. Jeanne Moreau is very touching, her eyes conveying a devastating effect.

Overall, a wonderful film and you'd be hard pressed to find a Western with as much emotional punch(to me only The Shootist comes close). 10/10 Bethany Cox

My favorite Lee Marvin role is the title role of the film Monte Walsh. Lee and his friend Jack Palance are a couple of aging cowboys who are proud of the trade they have, but the demands for it are becoming fewer and fewer.

Monte Walsh debuted two years after another film with the same themes, Will Penny brought great critical acclaim to Charlton Heston. Heston and Marvin essayed the same kind of role, the aging cowboys who are finding less and less work for themselves as the years pass.

Both Walsh and Penny practice their trade in the Brokeback Mountain country and you can bet that Ennis Delmar and Jack Twist when they got into town and went to the movies, really identified with both of these guys. Ennis and Jack could easily be the descendants of both Heston and Marvin.

Unlike Will Penny whose greatest challenge was with a bunch of renegade rawhiders, Monte Walsh has to deal with the death of his best friend at the hands of another he considered a friend. Palance gets tired of the cowboy life and settles down and gets married to a widow who owns a hardware store and gets killed in a robbery. The code by which both Marvin and Palance live by would allow for not even the law to mete out justice here.

Lee Marvin was not known for playing the most admirable characters on the screen, but he's positively noble in this role. I've never admired him more on the screen than in Monte Walsh. He invests the title character with humanity, dignity, and pride. Of course that was in an era when one could be proud of your labor and way of life.

Fourteen years earlier Marvin supported Jack Palance in an excellent World War II film, Attack. Now things came full circle as Marvin got to be a star via an Oscar for Cat Ballou and Palance supports him and well. That's the movie business for you.

Western veterans like G.D. Spradlin and Jim Davis support Marvin well. French cinema star Jeanne Moreau is Marvin's consumptive girl friend and Mitchell Ryan is the treacherous Shorty. And this was the farewell performance of Roy Barcroft one of the best western villains that ever sat a saddle.

People who are not necessarily western fans will appreciate the care that went into making this fine film.