By Photo: Liam Rogers / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Tom Selleck is best known to most audiences for Magnum, P.I. and, later, Blue Bloods. Western fans know a different filmography: a run of frontier stories spread over more than two decades, several of them adapted from novels by Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard and Jack Schaefer. Here is that list in order, with notes on where each story came from and how to find it.
The early L’Amour pictures
The Sacketts (1979). A two-part television miniseries drawn from L’Amour’s novels The Daybreakers and Sackett. Selleck played Orrin Sackett alongside Sam Elliott and Jeff Osterhage as his brothers, with veterans Glenn Ford and Ben Johnson in the cast. The production put the young actors next to men who had made Westerns for decades, and it is still one of the more faithful screen versions of the Sackett books.
The Shadow Riders (1982). Selleck and Elliott reunited as brothers in another L’Amour story, a post-Civil War rescue tale made for television.
Quigley Down Under (1990)
Selleck’s best-known Western is set not in the American West but in the Australian outback. Directed by Simon Wincer, it follows an American sharpshooter hired by a rancher played by Alan Rickman, with Laura San Giacomo as Crazy Cora. The long-range Sharps rifle at the center of the story became so closely tied to the film that gun makers still sell “Quigley” versions of it.
The TNT years
From the late 1990s Selleck made a series of Westerns for cable television that gave the genre a regular home at a time when theatrical Westerns were rare.
- Last Stand at Saber River (1997), from an Elmore Leonard novel, about a Confederate veteran who returns home to find his land taken.
- Crossfire Trail (2001), from L’Amour’s 1954 novel, about a man keeping a promise to a dying friend. It drew one of the largest audiences recorded for a basic-cable movie at the time.
- Monte Walsh (2003), a new version of Jack Schaefer’s novel about aging cowboys at the end of the open range. The 1970 film with Lee Marvin is the better-known version; Selleck’s is closer in mood to the book.
Why these films still find an audience
The common thread is source material. Each of these stories came from a writer who knew the history, and the productions mostly kept the books’ plain, unhurried pace. For readers in Colorado and Wyoming, the Schaefer and L’Amour titles also lead back to the novels themselves, which sit comfortably on any list of Western novels worth reading.
Where to watch and read
Availability on streaming services changes often, so check a current listing service before you go looking. Public libraries in the region, including the Poudre River Public Library District, the High Plains Library District and the Laramie County Library System, carry many of the source novels and some of the films on disc.
Sources
- Library of Congress and publisher catalog records for the source novels by Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard and Jack Schaefer.
- Film and television production credits as published by the studios and networks.
