Pauline Kael

“Jane Fonda looks great in her tan weather-beaten makeup and tight jeans, but her acting is disappointingly constricted. This woman rancher is more taciturn even than the Westerners of Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood, but where their silence was entertainingly heroic, hers is a matter of repression and man-hating. When Ella’s neighbor, Frank, is shot, she puts him on a cot in her barn, on dirty pillow ticking. He lies there in his bloodstained underwear, and all she does for him is leave some canned food nearby. When he gets better, she informs him that he owes her for the food and that she expects him to pay the debt by working on her ranch (Hostile Acres?). Eventually, Dodger reveals that her (now dead) father raised her as the son he never had. That wheezing line—it used to account for why a heroine wore pants or didn’t ride sidesaddle—doesn’t explain much. Why would being raised as a boy prevent her from keeping a wounded man clean? The movie turns into a cow-country version of Summertime: eventually, the patient, long-suffering Frank defrosts the tight, spinsterish Westerner. Caan holds his own with strong women (as he demonstrated in Funny Lady); he does it with dignity and without strain, using his smaller screen presence as a foil to their strength….

“Fonda and Caan ride and rope with convincing assurance, but the roundups are surprisingly brutal. The way that the panicking running animals are roped and come crashing down on their heads may be authentic, but it works against the film’s liberal and ecological theses. We’re supposed to see that Ella’s dedication to ranching preserves the land, while the nearby areas are being dynamited in the quest for oil. Yet it’s hard to work up much sentiment for this pair of honest ranchers who are tossing cows into back flips before sending them off to be slaughtered….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, November 13, 1978
Taking It All In, p. 487
[left out a little from p. 488]