Hearts of the West

Iowa farm boy Lewis Tater has a brainstorm: instead of continuing the correspondence courses that are learning him to write cowboy novels, he'll travel to the out-West school itself and soak up the campus atmosphere first hand. He arrives to find the school is a postal box. Write them, cowboy. Tater's adventures don't stop there in an acclaimed tumbling tumbleweed of a film that has him earning his spurs in the yippie-yi-o of '30s 'B' Westerns, complete with a veteran sage brusher (Andy Griffith), a savvy script girl (Blythe Danner) and a hilariously inept director (Alan Arkin, the New York Film Critics Award choice as the year's Best Supporting Actor). Jeff Bridges plays Tater, a likable pilgrim as fresh-faced and innocent as Bridges's decades-later Rooster Cogburn in True Grit is worn and wise.

Director: Howard Zieff
Producer: Tony Bill
Actor: Jeff Bridges
Actor: Andy Griffith
Actor: Donald Pleasence
Actor: Blythe Danner
Actor: Alan Arkin
Actor: Richard B. Shull
Actor: Herbert Edelman
Actor: Alex Rocco
Actor: Anthony James
Actor: Burton Gilliam
Actor: Matt Clark
Actor: Candy Azzara
Actor: Thayer David
Actor: Wayne Storm
Actor: Herb Edelman
Actor: Frank Cady
Actor: Marie Windsor
Actor: Anthony Holland
Actor: Dub Taylor
Actor: Raymond Guth
Actor: Herman Poppe
Actor: William Christopher
Actor: Jane Dulo
Actor: Dave Morick
Actor: Jacque Foti
Actor: Stuart Nisbet
Actor: Tucker Smith
Actor: Richard Stahl
Actor: Linda Borgeson
Actor: Titus Napoleon
Actor: Barbara Brownell