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!

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.

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

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.

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.