Vitals

Brad Pitt as Tristan Ludlow, tough bootlegger and World War I veteran

Montana, Fall 1925

Film: Legends of the Fall
Release Date: December 23, 1994
Director: Edward Zwick
Costume Designer: Deborah Lynn Scott

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Legends of the Fall may be a biblical title, but the style is autumnal, set amidst the network of the fictional Ludlow ranch in Montana across the first quarter of the 20th century.

Family patriarch William Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins) had been a decorated Army colonel before leaving the service in protest of the government’s treatment of Native Americans, raising his sons Alfred (Aidan Quinn), Tristan (Brad Pitt), and Samuel (Henry Thomas) on their remote ranch, where they learn to be the self-sufficient types that can survive bear confrontations… and if they don’t survive them, at least put up enough of a fight to earn “a good death.”

Portraying the tough but troubled Tristan Ludlow provided a breakthrough opportunity for Pitt, continuing the momentum he’d built in a similar role two years earlier in A River Runs Through It, though Tristan is arguably a more rugged character than Paul Maclean. By the mid-1920s, Tristan had seen and done it all, as a cowboy, soldier, big-game hunter, and now a bootlegger whose rumrunning runs him afoul of his own Volstead-voting brother Alfred and his nemeses, the crooked O’Banion brothers. As blood spills on both sides of the conflict, Tristan fears that those he love most are damned to die before him, only to be saved by the bonds of his family. Continue reading →