Joan Hackett

A Broadway actress fresh out of rehab navigates sobriety, her career, demanding daughter, and supporting her troubled friends' personal crises. A boozy Broadway actress comes out of a 12-week cure to face the problems of her best friends as well as her needy daughter. She tries to balance the terrors of returning to work with the demands of all around her with humor and insight, while staying off the booze. —Ed Lorusso Thirty-eight year old Georgia Hines, a divorced Broadway actress, has just been released from rehab for alcohol abuse after a three-month stint. Despite not particularly liking the taste of alcohol, she used it as a means to deal with her professional and personal insecurities. She is uncertain if she can handle life on the outside, but she will receive the support of her two best friends--the perfectly beautiful Toby Landau, and struggling gay actor Jimmy Perrino. Two of the many potential issues in Georgia's life that may derail her recovery are if she ever reconnects with David Lowe, an unsuccessful playwright who was her last boyfriend and who walked out of their relationship without a word, and how she will eventually revive her acting career. Despite those and the many other potential issues, Georgia's now seventeen year old daughter, Polly, is able to negotiate with both her parents to live with Georgia in this, her senior year at high school, before she heads off to college the following year. Polly loves her mother despite Georgia largely not having been there for Polly for much of her life. But as Toby and Jimmy deal with their own many insecurities, and as Polly negotiates her way through what is the difficult period of most female's lives of transitioning into womanhood, Georgia may have to be the one providing support to her family and friends, and her family and friends may not be able to be there for her if she does fall off the wagon. —Huggo

A year after Sheila is killed by a hit-and-run driver, her wealthy husband invites a group of friends to spend a week on his yacht playing a scavenger hunt mystery game. The game turns out to be all too real and all too deadly. Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain) is killed in a hit-and-run car accident while walking home from a party one night. A year later, her multi-millionaire husband Clinton (James Coburn) invites a group of friends (James Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, Richard Benjamin, Joan Hackett, Ian McShane) to spend a week with him on his yacht. Clinton loves to play elaborate games and he assigns everyone a secret--one is an alcoholic, another an informer and so on--that they are not to share with anyone. Every day for the next six days, they will call into a port where they will be given clues to discover one person's secret. The game takes a deadly twist when a murder takes place and it all has to do with the game they have been playing and the secrets that Clinton assigned at the outset. —garykmcd Megalomaniacal movie producer Clinton (James Coburn) invites six acquaintances on a week-long cruise on his yacht, the Sheila, named after his late wife, Sheila Green (Yvonne Romain). All are B-list Hollywood types looking for their next project. On board, they play a game that Clinton calls "The Sheila Green Memorial Gossip Game". The game quickly changes when some of the guests figure out Clinton's real motivations. —Huggo

A frontier town in the Old West springs up almost literally overnight when the rather klutzy and hotheaded Prudy Perkins discovers gold in a grave during a funeral. Her father Olly becomes mayor of the new settlement. He and the other members of the town council bemoan the twin facts that the place has become a drunken round-the-clock free-for-all, and that in order to ship out all the gold they are mining, they must pay a hefty fee to the Danbys, a family of ranchers/bandits who control the only route out of town. Most people are too busy digging to take time out to be sheriff, and those who are willing to put down their shovel quickly die. This all changes with the arrival in town of Jason McCullough, a calm and hyper-competent man from "back East" who is passing through town "on his way to Australia." While in the town saloon, he sees young Joe Danby gun a man down, essentially for fun. Needing money after discovering the town's ruinious rate of inflation, McCullough demonstrates his uncanny firearms ability to the mayor and town council, and becomes the new sheriff. He breaks up a street brawl and while at the Perkins house meets Prudy under (for her) mortifyingly embarrassing circumstances. McCullough then arrests Joe and tosses him in the town jail, which has everything a sheriff needs - except iron bars for the cell doors and windows. McCullough keeps the none-too-bright Joe "imprisoned" through the use of a chalk line, some dribbles of red paint, and applied psychology. In the process of all this, McCullough acquires a semi-willing deputy in the form of the extremely scruffy Jake, who was previously nothing more than the "town character." The arrest ignites the wrath of the patriarch of the Danby family; while the rest of the town immediately quiets down under McCullough's reign, "Pa" mounts various efforts to get Joe out of jail. None of them work and he then brings in a string of hired guns, who are equally unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Prudy spars romantically with McCullough, McCullough and Jake go on an unsuccessful search for gold, and, much to Joe's relief, bars are finally installed in the jail. The climax of the film sees Pa Danby summoning scores of his relatives to launch an all-out assault. The sheriff's first impulse is to just leave town and resume his trip to Australia, but when Prudy expresses her sincere approval of this sensible idea, he announces that it sounds cowardly and decides to stay. The rest of the townfolk announce their disapproval of his new plan, and officially vote to not help in any way. Thus the Danby mob rides in faced only by McCullough, Jake and Prudy. After a lengthy gunfight, McCullough bluffs his way to victory using hostage Joe and the cannon mounted in the center of town. As the Danbys are all marched off to jail, the cannon fires, smashing the town brothel and scattering the resident prostitutes and visting civic leaders. McCullough makes his peace with the townfolk, he and Prudy get engaged, and he carries her home. In a closing monologue, Jake directly informs the audience that they get married and McCullough goes on to become governor of the state, while he, Jake, becomes sheriff and then "one of the most beloved characters in western folklore."

Aging cowboy Will Penny gets a line camp job on a large cattle spread and finds his isolated cabin is already occupied by an abandoned woman traveler and her young son. Will Penny, an aging cowpoke, takes a "line-rider" job on a vast cattle ranch requiring him to keep trespassers and squatters moving until they're off the property. Ironically, he discovers that the mountain cabin reserved for the line rider has been appropriated by Catherine Allen and her young son, Horace, whose guide has deserted them en route to Oregon to join Catherine's husband. Too soft-hearted and ashamed to kick mother and child out just as the bitter Rocky Mountains winter sets in, he agrees to share the cabin until the spring thaw. But it isn't just the snow that slowly thaws; lonely man and woman soon forget their considerable dissimilarities and start developing a deep, if awkward and unstated, love for each another. Beyond this, Horace finds in Will the father he's never known, and Will finds in Horace the son he's never known he's wanted. The trio's little refuge is then invaded by Bible-quoting preacher Quint and his murderous family of "rawhiders", who'd earlier nearly killed Will over an imagined insult, forcing Will to defend his own "family". —Alfred Jingle Without a job the solitary middle-aged cowhand, Will Penny, is hired as a line-rider at a vast ranch to watch over the cattle and drive off trespassers from the land. However, the taciturn cowboy comes across the frontier widow, Catherine Allen, and her son, Horace, who have been abandoned by their guide and have taken refuge in his line shack. Much to their surprise, he takes pity on them and gives them a week to move out. But when Will is left for dead in the unforgiving desert by the wandering rawhider, Preacher Quint, and his boys, he will inevitably start rethinking his lonely life, as kind Catherine takes him in, and a quiet affection begins to bloom. Are those unfamiliar and restless feelings powerful enough to forsake a lifetime of solitude? —Nick Riganas