She Came to the Valley

The making of this film was a big deal to the local residents of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Based on the book of the same name by Cleo Dawson it caused quite a local stir when it came out. I remember going to see it and being greatly disappointed. My immediate reaction was that there must have been some sort of scam in which writers or producers or directors conspired to milk investment money out of over eager locals. I also suspected that the only place it was ever released in a theater was in South Texas. Another local interest movie was based on the singer Selena and was made up the coast in Corpus Christi. Obviously that movie had quite a different impact!

I just watched this movie on one of those $1 DVDs you get near the checkout at WalMart. I guess it was worth a dollar, mainly because it was packaged with another movie that was much more enjoyable. Still, I'm not sorry I watched it, even though it was hard to sit through. It was an experience. I agree with most of the reviewers here that the cast was a good one, and they tried really hard to make the seemingly pointless material come alive. On a more positive note: the movie is an unusual Western that deals with some real, late nineteenth century-early twentieth century history that most Westerns don't portray. And I'll say this for it... the script is so artless it actually makes the story more believable in a quirky sort of way. It has a kind of Reality TV feel to it. A lot of Dean Stockwell and Ronee Blakeley's family life was hard to watch though, because you just knew something was bound to go wrong to mess up their happiness. And besides that, Stockwell's character gets a crippling load dropped on him, and later gets run over by a car. Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

SHE CAME TO THE VALLEY has certainly a bad pedigree. It's Scott Glenn's lowest rated movie (4,3), it was filmed in 1976 but wasn't released until 1979, on Wikipedia it's not even clear the genre which this belongs and nearly all the other reviews give 1s and 2s. Last November I finally saw it and it's even worse than MAN OF THE CURSED VALLEY with Ty Hardin which is.hard to do!

Pat and Willy Westall (played by Dean Stockwell and Ronee Blakey) are poor and decide to move their family from Oklahoma to Texas. However along the way they meet drifter Bill Lester (Glenn) that persuades them to move to the valley: after a while we find out that this drifter is a supporter of the Pancho Villa revolution, and also a gun runner for Villa. Soon after the family gets involved in a dispute between the government soldiers and Pancho Villa's men and when Bill ends captured it's up to Willy to convince Villa to free him but at this point who cares?

To say that this movie is bad it would just be the tip of the iceberg. It's glacially slow, with the plots that drags on and on and on only to make the viewer enraged at the screen. Second, at the beginning Pat is hit on the head by a wooden box and still can walk on his crutches: with a blow caused by a wooden box, he should have at least died in a matter of days for consequences of the hit on the brain region. Third, despite is set during the Pancho Villa revolution it's incredibly uninvolving with characters that mostly talk, talk and talk and cinematography so cheap that is almost always dark. Fourth, the acting is incredibly lazy by all except by Glenn who perhaps tried but then after a while he adjusted to the movie's awfulness.

Fifth, and it's probably worst than the aforementioned problems, it doesn't even know what genre it tries to be. First it looks like a drama, then it looks like a western, then it looks like a movie set during the revolution. I found this incredibly confusing and sloppy.

Overall, probably one of the dullest movies I ever saw recently (including also THE BROKEN KEY and THE PASSENGER). I won't even recommend it to bad movie fans because it's not even worth making fun of, it's so tiring and uninvolving that it nearly gave me a migraine.

Skip the movie. It's a really poor adaptation of a darn good book. Read it.

This film begins with a man by the name of "Pat Westall" (Dean Stockwell) who has a dream about buying some land out in a desolate part of Texas in Webb County and moving his wife "Willy Westall" (Ronee Blakely) and young child there to start a farm. Unfortunately, just prior to actually traveling there Pat suffers from an accident which leaves him badly hobbled and delays their departure for some time. When they get there they do the best that they can but after a couple of years they decide to move to the Rio Grande Valley with the encouragement of a friend by the name of "Bill Lester" (Scott Glenn). What they don't realize is that there is quite of bit of political turbulence in that area revolving around two separate groups of people. The first involves German attempts to cause unrest with America while the other group is led by none other than-"Pancho Villa" (Freddy Fender). Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film essentially suffered from a certain lack of cohesion and character development which impacted the plot from start-to-finish. Likewise, none of the actors seemed quite able to dominate the screen in any way which is sometimes necessary for a film of this type. Be that as it may, while this wasn't a bad Western by any means, it definitely had room for improvement and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.