The Story in Brief
Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, two aging Texas Rangers, lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is eight hundred pages of American mythology — funny, violent, elegiac, and populated with characters so fully realised they seem to have existed before the novel and to continue after it. Simon Wincer's 1989 CBS miniseries, with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, is one of the finest television adaptations ever made of a major American novel. The debate about which is better is the best kind — the kind where both sides are right.
Key Differences
Gus McCrae
Robert Duvall's Gus is a performance for the ages — garrulous, philosophical, brave, infuriating, and entirely loveable. McMurtry's Gus is all of that but also stranger and more interior — his meditations on what he has lived and failed to live are richer on the page than any performance could fully capture. Duvall is the best possible Gus. McMurtry's Gus is still more.
The supporting cast
McMurtry populates his novel with dozens of fully realised characters — Elmira, July Johnson, Blue Duck, Dish Boggett, the incomparable Bolivar — each given enough space to become complete. The miniseries, at nearly seven hours, preserves more of these characters than any theatrical film could, but even seven hours cannot carry eight hundred pages. Some characters are compressed; a few are lost.
The landscape
McMurtry writes the American West with the authority of someone who knows it — the specific beauty and brutality of the landscape, the light in Texas and the cold in Montana, the way the land shapes the people who cross it. The miniseries was shot on location and captures the visual grandeur. But McMurtry's prose gives you the landscape from the inside.
Woodrow Call
Tommy Lee Jones plays Call as a man of almost pathological reticence, and it works. But McMurtry's Call is stranger — a man so armoured against feeling that he cannot recognise his own son, whose one act of tenderness is directed toward a corpse. The novel has more room to establish the specific shape of Call's damage. The miniseries suggests it; the novel shows it from inside.
The ending
Both versions end with the same extraordinary image — Call carrying Gus's body back to Texas across the continent, a journey that makes no practical sense and complete human sense. The miniseries earns this through Duvall and Jones. The novel earns it through eight hundred pages. Both endings are devastating. The novel's is more devastatingly earned.
Should You Read First?
Read first — but with the understanding that the miniseries is exceptional and you should watch it too. At seven hours it's the most faithful long-form television adaptation of a major novel you're likely to find. But McMurtry wrote eight hundred pages for a reason, and every page earns its place. Read first. Watch after. Gus McCrae deserves both.
McMurtry wrote one of the great American novels and Wincer made one of the great American television adaptations. Neither replaces the other — they're companion pieces that illuminate each other. The book is richer. The miniseries has Duvall. Start with the book. Finish with the miniseries. Mourn Gus twice.