Made-for-cable movies take yet another competitive leap forward with TNT's "Good Old Boys," beginning its run Sunday at 6 and 9 p.m. MST.

Tommy Lee Jones is not just the star of this cowboy tale set in west Texas of 1906. He's also a writer, adapting with J.T. Allen a 1978 novel by Elmer Kelton, and he is making a hot-dang impressive debut as a director.Jones, his face ever more creased and his Texas twang sometimes near impenetrable, plays Hewey Calloway, a cowpoke rascal with hardly a dollar to his name but who's overflowing with life.

Riding Biscuit, an old horse past his prime, Hewey returns to east Texas to find his brother, Walter (Terry Kinney), on the verge of losing the land he acquired under the 1903 Homestead Act. Yup, this is the old story of greedy bankers, fat cats who preach that "the practical side to patriotism is business," waiting impatiently to foreclose on the family farm. It still works, at least for nonbankers.

But there's a lot more to "The Good Old Boys."

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The nation is in transition. The wide, open spaces of the West are facing the threat of factories in which workers stay cooped up inside all day. People are putting ice in their drinks and developing a powerful fondness for ice cream.

There's talk of automobiles crowding horses off the trails and roads.

Jones keeps his story trotting amiably, only occasionally breaking into a slow canter.

He has been shrewd enough to surround himself with a whale of a cast. Sissy Spacek, who starred with him in "Coal Miner's Daughter," is Spring Renfro, the unmarried schoolteacher who quickly decides that there is nothing false about Hewey. Sam Shepard rides in as Snort Yarnell, another rambling cowboy, skeptical about Hewey's talk of settling down. Frances McDormand ("Mississippi Burning") is Walter's hard-working wife, maintaining an intense love-hate relationship with the occasionally irresponsible Hewey. And Wilford Brimley and Walter Olkewicz are perfectly slimy as the bankers.

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