Tom Selleck is one of the great later generation cowboys, he has an excellent track record. He should be able to get the funds to make about anything he wants. Why does he waste his time , money and our time remaking a classic that could'nt possibly be improved on? I realize that lack of imagination is the order of the day in Hollywood, but he should know better.
shareI think he just loved the character so much that he WANTED to be Monte, and he found a way to convince others to let him do it. It was a pretty good effort, even though it didn't really change much from the original. Kind of like watching a second performance of a stage play that you really like, only with different actors. Still, I sure would like to see the first one come out on DVD.
shareYour probably right. Lots of people want to be Elvis with no more luck than Tom did with Monte. It is like another actor trying to play Gus or Woodrow it just won't work. Sam Elliot found his own character with Conagher, surely Tom can find a great western story for himself. In the meantime I'm enjoying his contemporary sheriff on TV.
Hopefully a quality digital DVD of Monte will show up.
One small contribution that Selleck may have added (can't remember for sure) was when someone would tell him about their problems. He would ask them what their name was, whereupon they would tell him. Then he would reply "Well (insert name here), you have no idea how little I care." I could be wrong, but I don't think that Lee Marvin used that line.
shareI'll be frank, I like both versions...but for different reasons.
Selleck's Monte is a nice guy in a changing world. The overall tone of the Selleck version is more optimistic and hopeful. Whatever happens, that Monte will have a place in it.
Marvin's Monte is sadder. It was supposed to be sadder. The range depression of the late 1880s (and especially that horrible winter of 1888) marked the end of cowboying as it had been known. Chet is a realist and knows that "no one gets to be a cowboy forever." Monte knows no other way. Marvin's Monte is a tough, hardened man to whom the changing world is cold and harsh. He'll go on being his own man, but in the end, his only friend may be a horse.
I spent several years as a working cowboy. I look at westerns a bit differently from the average western fan. I knew plenty of "Sellecks": guys who were cowboys, but could just as easily be at home in another setting. Then there were the "Marvins": Guys to whom cowboying was what they were meant to do...and who would be lost in town. They might make a go of it, but they'd be depressed, sad and out of place.
I'm a Marvin.
I got a teaching certification, and I do teach, but my aim is to own a small patch of land, a few cattle, and a couple of good horses. I wear my boots and hat to school, as well as western patterned ties...I have an old saddle on display in my room, and when the rodeo is taking place, and our school does "Western Day," I come in in chaps, spurs and my old work hat. That's when my kids see that their History teacher really WAS a cowboy...and they understand why there's that catch in my voice when I teach the old west unit...and why I have some bitterness when I mention barbed wire.
In the end, I prefer the Marvin version of Monte Walsh because his Monte is the kind of cowboy I was: The one who never wanted to do anything else...might do something else...but will eventually go back to what he was meant to be...the lonely man on a horse doing a job for too little money and too much chance of getting hurt because it's what comes from inside.
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"It's a hard country, kid."
I'm a "Marvin man" myself. I love Tom Selleck but feel his Monte was basically Magnum in western cloths. That good ole bot was just as at home in a Hawiian shirt or cowboy clothes. Selleck just can't seem to nail down a classic cowboy role as well as he did Magnum or the newer New England police chief roles. Its a shame because he is a classic cowboy.
Surely someone will do a high quality digital DVD of the Lee Marvin version. An outfit called Platinum Disc has done very high quality DVD's of many Hoppy movies and of some of the Bordertown TV series and so I know it could be done
There is only one Monte Walsh and his name ain't Selleck, it's Marvin.
Tom Selleck is be best cure for insomnia there is.
I'm a Marvin, I think Lee should have won an oscar for this movie.
shareTom Selleck's remake was okay, but as others have said, the original was a gem. L
shareSelleck certainly has the looks and facial fungus to be a screen cowboy and keeps on trying to nail it with limited success.
The one exception IMHO, is (of all the things) the Aussie western "Quigley Down Under" where his laconic character is picture perfect even amongst the very different Antipodean scenery.
Come on lads, bags of swank!
I like Tom Selleck as Magnum and Jesse Stone,but he fails miserably in every Western film that he has dared to be cast in or done himself.
His lousy remake of Lee Marvin's Monte Walsh is an insult.
Tom trys to be Sam Elliot,but comes off as an awkward fat man.
baskethilt was correct in 2006.