Respect for women.  The detestation of cruelty, whether that of the Indian or of the white man.  Manly struggle for the good of others.

These are the values upheld in the short 1957 novel, West to the Sun, by Noel Loomis. Loomis wrote Westerns, and this is essentially what Sun is despite its being set in the 1700s on the cusp of the Revolutionary War.  Yes, the characters–Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards in North America–are paper-thin, but the story is a sturdy grabber and the details are engaging.  Disturbing too:  boy, could the Indians be shockingly brutal!

In Between the Lines (1977), directed by Joyce Micklin Silver, pleasing performances issue from John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Stephen Collins, Jill Eikenberry and others. Thanks to Silver, though, Eikenberry looks almost unattractive, and so does the satisfactory Gwen Welles except for her bare bosom.

The flick is about the worldly concerns of workers at an underground newspaper, the Mainline, in Boston. (Heard’s character is a Damn Good Writer.) Although I was often entertained by it, I found very little of it to be believable. It ain’t the gold we would like to see from Silver.