“Happens to everybody. Horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.”

American individualism as a deadly contagion that quickens its spread within each subsequent generation. Newman and Douglas are staggering here, but Patricia Neal is truly the soul. As a big-time lover of Larry McMurtry, something about his prose (and especially his dialogue) just clicks like nothing else when it comes to film adaptations — this is no exception. James Wong Howe… nobody’s coming for your crown. He cloaks this devastating, bleak picture in some of the most gorgeous shadows ever cast on Western vistas.