She Came to the Valley

With good cast (Stockwell, Glenn, and Blakely) and singer freddy Fender playing Pancho Villa, this got to be a intresting film, but it isn't. Stockwell and Blakely plays a couple who lives in Texas, but Pancho Villa and Glenn effect their lives. Glenn gives a very deadpan performance, as if he didn't want to be in this. Fender chews up the role as Villa, but telly Savalas did it better in the 1971 film. The title song is sunged by Fender. The film seems to be on several diffrent video labels, so they must be a copyright problem or something. The seems to be re-done as the US subtitles (on Mexican dialogue) look like it was on video optics.

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!

Director Albert Band co-wrote and produced a few good spaghetti westerns in the sixties. In the seventies he landed back on American shores with a thud in this misfire about turn of the century housewife Ronnee Blakeley, her long suffering crippled husband Dean Stockwell, and their old friend Scott Glenn, who runs guns for Pancho Villa, played by country singer Freddy Fender.

A decent cast tries hard but leaden pacing and a general lack of interesting developments sink this. In fact, the film goes on for nearly an hour, dwelling on Blakeley and Stockwell's dull domestic life, before anything even resembling a plot is hatched.

Once Pancho Villa enters the picture, you get to see just how embarrassingly naive Stockwell and Blakeley's characters are.

Cinematographer Daniel Pearl and Art Director Robert A. Burns were more successful a few years earlier in another regionally made film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!

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.