Digger Barnes is furious when his friend Jock Ewing starts dating the love of his life Eleanor Southworth. He is also convinced that Jock has cheated him out of his share in their oil fields. And so begins the decades long Barnes-Ewing feud. This made-for-television film attempts to fill in the missing early years of the fortunes and follies of the Ewing and Barnes families for fans of the long-running DALLAS TV Series (1978-1991). While focusing on the triangle of Jock – Ellie – Digger, the movie also features Jock's brother Jason (David Wilson) and Ellie's father Aaron (Hoyt Axton) as starring characters. It shows the origin of Ewing Oil, and Jock's schemings to make it big, and it deals with the inter-family relations of the Ewings, the Barnes, and the Southworths; also showing Jock's first marriage to Amanda Lewis, and Ellie's relationship with her brother Garrison and mother Barbara. J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) provides the opening narration for the film. The story opens at a 1951 barbecue with "Digger" Barnes firing a shot at "Jock" Ewing. Immediately flashing back to the depression, the two men first meet in a boxcar as both are hoboing. Their original friendship is built on their desires to find oil. But their failings start as they both compete for the hand of the beautiful Miss Ellie. Jock is shown to be an honorable man caught up in a backlash. Digger is a neurotic, alcoholic with a gift for finding oil. The weekly DallasTV series depicts Jock Ewing (played by Jim Davis) as a flawed human being. But after the death of Jim Davis in 1981, the writers have been making a saint out of Jock Ewing ever since. The writer of this prequel, David Jacobs, seems to bend over backwards to refute the notion that Jock Ewing stole Ewing Oil and Miss Ellie from Digger Barnes. While Jacobs' is somewhat successful in explaining away Jock's appropriation of Ewing Oil for himself, he fails miserably in writing an apologetic concerning Jock taking his best friend's love interest for himself. The ending, in which Jock dissolves his partnership with Digger and takes Ellie for himself is rushed and contrived, as if Jacobs is trying too hard to prop up the image of Jock Ewing. The inclusion of black sharecroppers as early contributors to the success of Ewing Oil also seems contrived. In the TV series, Jock Ewing and his family had little or no interaction with black people. But in this prequel, Jock Ewing is transformed into an ahead-of-time 1930s advocate for black people who even invites black guests to Southfork for the annual family barbecue in 1951.

• published: 20 Aug 2019
• views: 188445