I’d never heard of this movie, but I’ll almost always take a chance on a Western, so when we came across a DVD of FAR HAVEN at the library, we picked it up. Turns out it was made for the INSP TV network, a digital network that specializes in classic Westerns and inspirational originals.
As such, you’d expect FAR HAVEN to be on the heart-warming side, and it is, although there’s some decent action, too. Former soldier Hunter Braddock, who spent two years in prison because he deserted rather than take part in the massacre of innocent Indian women and children, returns to his home in Arizona Territory to find that the settlers around the town of Far Haven have been suffering attacks from the Apaches. But are the Indians really to blame, or could it possibly be white outlaws pretending to be Indians? (I know, we’ve never seen that plot twist before, have we?) Braddock tries to get to the bottom of this while at the same time reconciling with his teenage kids and the parents of his late wife. Oh, and there’s a very mild romance with the local schoolmarm, too.
It would be very easy to get snarky about how everything in this movie is a very overdone cliché, but it’s made with such heartfelt sincerity that it kind of won me over despite its predictability. The production values aren’t bad. It was filmed in Mescal, Arizona, and at least it looks like a Western. (For a while a few years ago, it seemed like every independent Western was filmed in the same muddy, gloomy Canadian locations.) The cast is what’s going to make a movie like this either work or not, and by and large, it does, at least for me. Bailey Chase, who was in LONGMIRE, plays the stalwart Hunter Braddock. Martin Kove plays the main bad guy. (Really? Martin Kove playing a bad guy? Who’d’a thunk it?) Chris Mulkey is the corrupt sheriff. A. Martinez is the local blacksmith/stable owner. Bruce Boxleitner is a rancher and the father-in-law of Chase’s character. Jesse Kove, Martin’s son in real life, is a good-guy ranch hand and turns out to be a decent actor and an impressive physical presence. I wouldn’t mind seeing him in more movies. Don Most (yeah, Ralph Malph his own self) owns the general store, and when he tries to stir up a lynch mob against an innocent Indian prisoner who’s been wrongly tied to the massacres, it’s the most Ralph Malph thing ever. When it was all over, I said to Livia, “Neal McDonough must have been out of town that week, because everybody else is in this movie.” But everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves, and there was a definite air of “Hey, let’s all go out in the desert and make a movie!”
Also when it was over, I made the comment that this is a BCI Western written by Lew Lacy, meaning it bears a distinct resemblance to the novels Lacy wrote for Book Creations Inc. back in the Eighties, including the Badge series as by Bill Reno and quite a few of the Stagecoach Station books under the house-name Hank Mitchum. Lacy, who also wrote under the names Al Lacy and Morgan Hill, was an evangelist in real life, and his BCI novels always featured quite a few gunfights and fistfights and a few moments touching lightly on religion. That’s a pretty good description of FAR HAVEN. Most of the reviews of it on-line either love it or hate it. My opinion comes down firmly in the middle. I enjoyed watching it, and I think they were honestly trying to make a good Western. Sometimes, that’s enough for me.
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