A little girl’s dream: Being on the ‘Tom Horn’ film set with Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen’s widow Barbara Minty, a self-professed cowgirl born on a dairy farm in Oregon, grants a scoop interview about the halcyon months she spent in southern Arizona seeing the 1960s box office titan film his final Western role “Tom Horn.” In the accompanying still a steely-eyed, tobacco-chewing 48-year-old King of Cool means business as the titular “Tom Horn” on location near Nogales, Arizona, circa March 1979. Photography by Dave Friedman / Courtesy of Barbara Minty McQueen / appears in “Steve McQueen: The Last Mile…Revisited”

Tom Horn was Steve McQueen’s penultimate film and perhaps the project closest to his heart. Based on the life of the controversial Wild West detective-hired assassin, the star and executive producer archived extensive notes on a tape recorder over a nearly three-year period.

The actor even went so far as to camp out one night at the gunfighter’s final resting place in Boulder, Colorado, eerily claiming Horn’s ghost dropped in on him. McQueen’s efforts paid off handsomely, as dyed in the wool fans consider the role to be among his best. Friend and fellow actor James Coburn concurred in an interview for Marshall Terrill’s acclaimed 1993 biography, Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel.

With a dependable supporting cast — a pre-Dynasty Linda Evans, Richard Farnsworth, Slim Pickens, Billy Green Bush, Geoffrey Lewis, Elisha Cook, Jr. [blown to smithereens by the despicable Jack Palance in Shane— the film nevertheless languished at the box office when distributed in March 1980.

So why was Tom Horn a failure? It bowed at a time when the Western genre was dead in the water. The last year when a recurring stream of big budget westerns was green-lit was 1976. John Wayne’s The Shootist, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, Marlon Brando’s The Missouri Breaks, Goldie…