Die Gesetzlosen

Any western that stars Sam Elliott is usually a good one. Few people have ever looked and sounded more like a cowboy than Sam. Also, most westerns feature beautiful landscapes and overall photography, and this film is no exception. Being made-for-TV, it could have been made on-the-cheap but it wasn't. I am not a fan of Ted Turner but his TNT westerns look beautiful, all of them.

Elliott plays a lower-key role than usual, being an appealing sort as a loving father and husband and a good-guy marshal. This western is a bit different in that the time period is the early 1900s with automobiles and such dotting the landscape.

There is not a lot of action in here and not an especially happy ending, either, but it's a good western that worth you while to check out.

In 1924, legendary lawman turned silent film star Bill Tilghman (Sam Elliott) reluctantly agrees to clean up a grimy Oklahoma town controlled bootlegging gangsters and full of rowdy oil-rig workers. He ends up squaring off against coked-out, renegade G-Man Arliss Howard.

This production looks fantastic, with lots of attention to detail and great atmosphere. Unfortunately, there's too much talk and not enough action to go along with the vivid sets, costumes, and locations. This ends up being more of a character study than a western or gangster story.

Sam Elliott does a great job as Tilghman, who rode with the Earps and went up against the real-life Wild Bunch. If anything, the film does do an excellent job at portraying a man who has little left to offer but his pride and stories of past triumphs.

This movie definitely could have been better. First, you've got a great story of a great man to the people and law of Cromwell. Second, without a doubt, you've got Sam Elliot! After Clint Eastwood, nobody took the role of a great western actor...until Sam Elliot.

Sam Elliott was made for the lead in this film, playing William Tilghman in his final weeks as a lawman in an Oklahoma "Oil Patch" town in the mid-1920s. He's simply over-powering in demeanor and gait and attitude. Pay special attention at the end when he bids farewell to his family. Oh, my!... Other mostly unknown actors are mostly okay, but Arliss Howard's drug-addled primary bad guy seems a tad much over the top (I reckon I cotton to heavies who are bad _and_ smart).... Best all is the production which features a roughneck oil town and mud and iron/steel workers and noise and mobs and blacksmiths and misery and saloons and cathouses and ... well, you get the idea.... As a bonus, movie buffs get to see reproductions of Tilghman's own silent movies about his exploits as a young lawman.... Thus, a many-dimensional treat for us hero-worshipers who grew up with the movies.

It's too bad that Sam Elliott didn't come along 20 or 30 years earlier to films. If he had he would never lack for work as a cowboy hero. He's not done too bad in the present day in any event. In You Know My Name he plays one of the west's last genuine heroes from the old days in a new era with little regard for law enforcement which proves to be his undoing.

Bill Tilghman, one of the great frontier marshals of the old west took his last job in law enforcement in Cromwell, Oklahoma in 1924. It was an oil boom town, a wide open town with roughneck money fueling the economy the way the trail hands did back in Tilghman's prime. Now however big city gangsters and their hirelings are running things and even though Prohibition is in the Constitution, that doesn't seem to matter to a thirsty public. It's a world of rumbleseats in flivvers, tommy guns, and bobbed hair on women, Tilghman is out of his time.

He's also got a jurisdictional dispute with Prohibition Federal agent Arliss Howard playing the corrupt T-Man, Wiley Lynn. For all the agents like Eliot Ness, there were more like Wiley Lynn, getting rich on bribes enabling people to flout an unpopular law.

Elliott gives one of his best performances as Bill Tilghman. A weary man who could sit back on his laurels and they were considerable, at the age of 70, yes 70, he goes back to doing the work of a younger man because the younger man are corrupt in a corrupt age. This part was one where Sam Elliott's premature gray hair stood him in good stead.

What you see in You Know My Name is the truth, exactly what happened to Tilghman. I would commend people to read up on Tilghman and find out that this last of the frontier marshals had one glorious career that came to a sad end. This is a wonderful film about a western hero who literally did die with his boots on.