Tom Selleck, Sam Elliot, and Jeff Osterhage are cast appropriately as the rough and ready but charismatic Sackett brothers in this above-average, serio-comic television adaptation of Louis L'Amour's frontier novel "The Sacketts. The Civil War has ended with Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Sam Elliot is a Confederate officer on his way home to Texas when he is waylaid and finds his head in a noose. Fortunately, Tell Sackett saves him from being hanged and they ride home together to find misfortune awaiting them. Seems a renegade Confederate Major has taken not only Elliot's wife (Katherine Ross) hostage but also another Sackett ( Jeff Osterhage) along with several other women. Seems Ross has been remarried because she thought Sackett had been killed in the war. Not sooner have the two Sacketts lit out after these villainous rebels than the other Sackett taken hostage manages to escape. He makes his break while the unreconstructed rebs are occupied. These rebs have set up camp on the beach when Osterhage escapes. The major's men wound him as he plunges into the surf during his escape. Not surprisingly, Osterhage manages to survive his wound, and the Sackett brothers stumble onto him. He fills them in about the hostages taken by the nefarious Major and joins them. He leads them back to the shoreline camp where the Major has made a rendezvous with a gun runner (R. G. Armstrong of "Ride the High County") and shoots it their camp. Our heroes manage to rescue Ross. Later, the Sacketts enlist Uncle Jack (Ben Johnson of "Rio Grande") as a tracker because he knows his way around Mexico with predictable but entertaining results.
Review of The Sacketts
