The Desperate Trail

A woman , convict of killing an abusive husband , manages to escape from the marshal Bill Speakes (Sam Elliott) who's escorting to her hanging . After a failed stagecoach robbery Sarah (Lind Fiorentino) and another thief named Jack Cooper (Craig Sheffer) rob the money , the latter managing to snatch away the transported twenty-five hundred dollars from her . So she follows him to get it back . Soon after , she teams up with the con man in a plot to rob a bank to start a new life . While the marshal who wants her dead so wrongly , he even doesn't mind breaking the law , as he enlists a posse and sets after them. Travellers. Partners. Lovers. Robbers. No one escapes from Marshal Bill Speakes.

This The Desperate Trail ¨(1994) contains strong performances augmented by blazing guns , hobbled by weak writing . Nevertheless, it doesn't have much interest at times , neither intensity enough , though Sam Elliott captures his role pretty well . J. P. Pesce's slick direction , he was named Best Independent Director of the Year at the Hamptons International Film Festival for his critically acclaimed film The Desperate Trail (1994) , which he wrote and shoot . Nice acting from Sam Elliot as the merciless avenger Marshal Speakes who's really decided to sentence his contender to the gallows . Star Sam Elliott is a detached figure in Western genre , being one of its main representatives , performing a lot of them in the Eighties and Nineties , as cinema as TV , such as : Cactus , Houston The Legend of Texas , Yellow Rose , The Quick and the Dead , Gettysburg , Hi-Lo County , You Know My Name , Buffalo Girls , Indians, Wild Times , The Shadow Riders , and several others . While Linda Fiorentino is fine as the brave woman and an arrested killer who decides to no longer take any humiliation or battery , as she frees herself . She becomes partner to bandit Jack Cooper well played by Craig Sheffer.

The motion picture was professionally directed by P. J. Pesce , though it has some flaws . P. J. Pesce studied directing under and Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese from whom he received honors and also studied editing and acting . This filmmaker is an expert on sequels such as he proved in ¨Sniper 3 ¨ and ¨ From dusk till down : the hangman's daughter ¨ and ¨The lost boys : the tribe¨. Equally , he directed a lot of episodes of notorious TV series , such as : ¨Leverage¨ , ¨Fringe¨ , ¨Transporter¨, ¨Under the Dome¨ , ¨Supernatural¨ , ¨American Gothic¨ , ¨Code Black¨, ¨Quantico¨, ¨Blue Bloods¨ , among others. Rating : 6/10 . Acceptable and passable Western . The movie will appeal to Sam Elliott fans.

Sam Elliot and Linda Fiorentino go toe to toe in this very entertaining TV western. Elliott plays Marshall Bill Speakes, a lawman obsessed with catching Sarah O'Rourke (Fiorentino), his fugitive daughter-in-law. It seems that Sarah killed her husband. Speakes is understandably rather upset and tears up the west pursuing her when she escapes his grasp. Along the way, Sarah allies herself with a dandified highwayman and the story becomes a rather quirky Bonnie and Clyde story. But things aren't always what they seem as Speakes' tactics for catching the pair become increasingly ruthless as Elliott goes against his usual good-guy image. The audience sympathies are fully with the outlaws in this story. Writer-Director Pesce gives the story a relentless pace as the antagonists maneuver around each other. Visually, the film owes a lot to Leone and Peckinpah (right down to the slow motion death scenes) but the plot is so fast-paced and the characters are so interesting, the pyrotechnics never over-shadow the story. If you are a fan of either Elliott or Fiorentino, The Desperate Trail is a must see.

This movie seems to have been written under the shade of Unforgiven - the beating of a woman justifies over a dozen murders. I didn't see it that way. Throughout the movie, my sympathy (unlike that of Mr. English who also reviewed this) was with the marshal (as rough as he was) in catching and hanging the murderer - and her partner.

The movie was very well-done though - and a particularly wonderful and surprising beginning.

Note the wonderful chimed music when things get most exciting.

It's worth seeing. Linda Fiorentino is superb - and Elliott was born to play westerns - and does this wonderfully - with great restraint.

This little-known Western is well-made and well-cast, with strong performances from Craig Sheffer and Linda Fiorentino. What starts out as a light-hearted romp becomes progressively darker, shading into tragedy at the end. There is an unusual and striking music score, which materially adds to the film.

It's too bad that Sam Elliot was born about 30 years too late and was not on the scene in the 40s and 50s when westerns began to change to more adult themes. He was as born to the saddle as a Joel McCrea or a Gary Cooper was, Elliott would have been a superstar then.

Not that he's done too badly now as The Desperate Trail shows. It's just that westerns have limited release for a specialized audience now. When we meet Elliott he's a marshal escorting a handcuffed prisoner for a date with a hangman. His prisoner is Linda Fiorentino and a holdup interrupts the journey.

When all is said and done another passenger Craig Sheffer makes off with several grand in Wells Fargo money and Fiorentino is loose and Elliott in a most embarrassing position. Naturally the marshal rounds up a posse and pursues the outlaws.

But this is a western with modern and adult themes, more modern than was discussed even in those beginning days of adult westerns. Sam and Linda do have a relationship of sorts and Linda is a battered spouse. As the film progresses Elliott is shown not to be the upstanding marshal that he professes to be and what we expect in the usual type of westerns.

If you like action there are more than enough shooting incidents to satisfy your craving. Elliott, Fiorentino, and Sheffer give fine performances in the leads.

A western with some very modern themes.