The Underrated James Caan Western That Was Struck By Tragedy

In 2025, there is no excuse for a film set to be anything other than fully safe and secure. Obviously, accidents will happen. Just as sure as you might take a stumble while out for a walk, or put a foot wrong while walking up the stairs, people will get hurt performing stunts. What should never, ever occur, however, is a miscue that leaves someone seriously injured or, god forbid, dead. When there is a fatal accident on set, it is almost certainly due to gross negligence, as was the case when Alec Baldwin shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a live round from a prop gun during the filming of “Rust.”

Fortunately, there have been relatively few instances of such incompetence over the last couple of decades, but during the silent and early talkies eras, fatal accidents were much more frequent. Airplane stunts went awry, fires got wildly out of control, and people got thrown from or trampled by horses. Similarly, three pilots were killed during the filming of Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels” in 1929, three horsemen were killed while performing in a cavalry charge on the set of “They Died with Their Boots On,” and let’s not get into how routinely horses were offed in the process of shooting Westerns.

Set safety gradually became more of a priority for studios and producers (because lawsuits), but stunt people still took massive risks to deliver a spectacular or bruising bit of action, and these bits could occasionally go south. One such mishap occurred on the set of an underrated Western from director Alan J. Pakula that starred Jane Fonda, James Caan, and Jason Robards.

“Comes a Horseman” is a 1970s Western from a New Hollywood auteur, which means it cannot simply be a Western. This tendency toward subversion and revisionism wasn’t always a bad thing. After all, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood basically saved the genre from the old-fashioned sensibilities of headed-out-to-pasture legends like John Wayne. But sometimes the movies got too weird for their own sakes, which was certainly the case with Arthur Penn’s “The Missouri Breaks” (a film that paired rustler Jack Nicholson with a master-of-disguise regulator played to the bizarro hilt by Marlon Brando).

Pakula didn’t have to contend with the movie-hijacking likes of Brando, but, working once again with the great cinematographer Gordon Willis, he clearly wanted to give the Western a quasi-contemporary gothic sensibility with the 1940s-set “Comes a Horseman.” The slow-moving plot is no great shakes (Robards’ land-greedy rancher is trying to keep an entire valley all to himself), but the dour mood is undeniable. It’s worth a watch, though, if only for Willis’ photography and some truly stellar performances by Caan, Robards, Fonda, Richard Farnsworth, and George Grizzard.

Just know that when you’re watching it, the scene in which Robards’ character gets dragged by his horse was made possible by a stunt that killed the actor’s double, Jim Sheppard. According to a 1977 article in The New York Times, the stunt went wrong when the horse unpredictably dragged Sheppard in the wrong direction, which led to the performer cracking his head on a fence post. Sheppard died from his injuries in a nearby Colorado hospital.

That these mishaps happen so rarely nowadays should come as a relief, but it’s still unconscionable when something as wholly unpreventable as the “Rust” incident occurs. Here’s hoping something that godawful and horrible never occurs again.