This elegy for the Old West is a beautifully crafted and very funny film. Like director Sam Peckinpah's earlier and more explicitly violent The Wild Bunch, it leaves an audience with nostalgic pangs for a lifestyle that perhaps only existed in motion pictures. Tender and ironic by turns, it contains marvellous performances from a whimsical Jason Robards (arguably a career best) as an itinerant prospector who "found water where there wasn't" and sexy Stella Stevens (definitely a career best) as the hooker who becomes his lady. It was severely truncated for release in Britain, where it ignominiously supported The Alf Garnett Saga, but the fabulous two-hour version, replete with its lilting ballad link Tomorrow Is the Song I Sing, is sublime.

Double-crossed and left without water in the desert, Cable Hogue is saved when he finds a spring. It is in just the right spot for a much needed rest stop on the local stagecoach line, and Hogue uses this to his advantage. He builds a house and makes money off the stagecoach passengers. Hildy, a prostitute from the nearest town, moves in with him. Hogue has everything going his way until the advent of the automobile ends the era of the stagecoach.