She was as strong as the land for which she fought. And as vunerable.

A story of love and freedom


Old man Ewing (Jason Robards) owns a ranch right next to the ranch of Ella (Jane Fonda). This is a source of two problems: Ewing wants to gobble up most of the land around the two ranches and also wants Ella's ranch; secondly, when Ella was too young to know better, she went to bed with the man, which, many years later, she considers to have been a grievous error on her part. A third problem arises when oil companies begin pressuring both of them to allow drilling on their land, and Ewing won't allow it -- on his or anyone else's land. Before long, war-veteran Frank (James Caan) enters Ella's life and helps her fight to save her land and her sanity, with added assistance from Dodger (Richard Farnsworth), an old local who knows the score.


Comes a Horseman is a 1978 film starring James Caan, Jane Fonda, Jason Robards, and Richard Farnsworth, directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Set in the American West of the 1940s but not a typical Western, it tells the story of two ranchers (Caan and Fonda) whose small operation is threatened both by economic hardship and the expansionist dreams of a local land baron (Robards).
Farnsworth, a former stuntman, received a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance.
A stuntman working on this film, Jim Sheppard, was killed while doing a scene where Robards' character is dragged to (presumably) his death. A horse dragging him veered from its course and caused Sheppard to hit his head on a fence post. The scene made it into the movie, although it is cut right before the horse passes through the gate where the fatal accident occurred.


Release date: October 27, 1978


Distrib: United Artists