Sierra (1950)

Sierra is an early (1950) Audie Murphy western. I’ve become a rather obsessive Audie Murphy fan. I’ve now seen seven of his westerns. They’re all enjoyable and a couple of them, in my opinion, rank among the very best westerns of the classic western era.

Sierra begins with a cute but headstrong girl, Riley Martin (Wanda Hendrix), causing a major headache for Ring Hassard (Audie Murphy) and his dad Jeff (Dean Jagger). They live in a shack way up in the mountains. No-one knows they’re there. That’s how they want to keep things. They have a good reason. They need to avoid the law. Years earlier Jeff Hazzard was accused of murder. He always proclaimed his innocence but he couldn’t prove it.

Now Riley Martin knows about them. She could talk. She promises she won’t. They trust her. They have to. They can’t kill her. They’re outsiders but they’re nice guys.

There’s another problem. Riley also, quite inadvertently, brought about an accident in which Jeff was so seriously injured that his life in danger. That means they’ll need to get a doctor up there. Then everyone will know that they’ve been living in the mountains and the sheriff will send a posse.

In the midst of all these dramas Ring shoots Riley. He had to. It was for her own good. She’d been bitten by a rattlesnake. You can learn fascinating things by watching movies. Apparently you can eliminate rattlesnake venom by shooting the person in the infected area. It’s something worth remembering.

Of course this attracts more attention.

Jeff and Ring have an obsession. It’s an enormous herd of wild horses. No-one believes the herd exists but they’ve seen it. They aim to round up that herd one day. Then they’ll have the money to buy the ranch they always wanted.

So Ring (with help from some other semi-outlaws) is trying to round up the mustang herd whilst keeping a step ahead of the posse. And he’s made a couple of other very dangerous enemies as well, and they’re also gunning for him. He has a lot on his plate.

Of course Riley has fallen for Ring. A girl always feel closer to a guy after he’s shot her. And he has the glamour of being a sexy outsider rebel with a sensitive side. How could she resist him? Ring thinks Riley is pretty special as well.

It’s a fairly routine but serviceable western plot and a bit on the contrived side. You can see the crucial plot twist coming up a mile away.


The biggest problem is Burl Ives. He plays Jeff Hazzard’s wise old buddy Lonesome. Lonesome is a sort of comic relief character and he’s already irritating enough and he starts to sing. And he just keeps on singing. I guess this is supposed to add a folksy warm-hearted touch but I just wanted someone to fill Lonesome full of lead.

On the plus side it’s a Universal International 1950s western in Technicolor and they always looked nice. This one has cinematography by Russell Metty so it looks very nice indeed.

And it has Audie Murphy. This was the kind of role he handled with erase - a quiet self-effacing nice guy but you can tell that underneath the mild exterior there’s real grit and a stubborn obsessiveness. Added to which Murphy had charm and charisma.

Wanda Hendrix makes a fairly likeable Feisty Heroine. Riley has had a fancy big city education but she was born on the frontier and was one of those girls who learned to ride before she learned to walk.

Look out for Tony Curtis in a bit part.

Sierra is nothing special but it’s enjoyable and it’s recommended. It's included in the second of Kino Lorber's Audie Murphy Blu-Ray boxed sets.

Over the course of the 1950s Audie Murphy’s westerns just got better and better and towards the close of the decade he made the excellent Hell Bent for Leather (1960) and the absolutely magnificent No Name on the Bullet (1959).

Gunsmoke (1953)

Gunsmoke is a 1953 Universal-International western directed by Nathan Juran. It certainly hits the ground running.

We get an action scene right at the start. We meet the hero Reb Kittredge (Audie Murphy). He’s a very likeable guy but a few minutes into the movie we know he has a Shady Past. We was, and maybe still is, a hired gun.

We’re introduced to rancher Dan Saxon (Paul Kelly). He’s in danger of losing his ranch. He has a beautiful daughter, Rita (Susan Cabot), who’s engaged to be married to Saxon’s foreman Curly (Jack Kelly). But Reb has already taken a shine to Rita. And Saxon is sure that Reb has been sent to kill him. That turns out to be not quite the case.

This is all within the first few minutes but already we know we have a classic setup for a western with lots of potential for tangled relationships between the main characters. And we’re not sure about the hero. Is he still a killer? This is how you make a western!

Reb is soon in for a surprise. He finds himself owning a ranch, the Square S ranch. It was Dan Saxon’s ranch. They made a deal, of a kind. It’s not all good news. He owns the debts attached to it as well. But he if can drive the herd to the railroad company he’ll have enough money to pay the debts.

There is of course a sinister figure pulling strings in the background. Matt Telford (Donald Randolph) aims to own every ranch in the valley. Including the Square S. He’ll stop at nothing, including hiring gunslinger Johnny Lake (Charles Drake) to kill Reb.

There’s high drama as Reb tries to drive his herd to market, in the face of all kinds of nefarious plots.

I think the ending is quite satisfactory. We know there’s going to be a showdown but we can’t figure out how Reb is going to manage this since he’s injured his right arm - his shooting arm. That problem is solved neatly.

This is Audie Murphy doing what he did so well, playing a really likeable guy who manages to give the impression that he could be very dangerous indeed. Reb is likeable and he’s also ambitious with a streak of ruthlessness. He has the ranch. Now he wants Dan Saxon’s daughter. She belongs to Curly. Reb will just have to take her away from Curly.

The supporting players are all perfectly adequate. Susan Cabot is fine as the prickly Rita and Mary Castle is very good as bad girl dancehall singer/dancer Cora Dufrayne.

This is not one of the great westerns and Nathan Juran is not one of the great directors He is however a skilled professional. He understands that pacing is everything. Keep the action moving along and nobody will notice any deficiencies in the script. That’s what he does here.

The movie was shot in Technicolor in the Academy ratio. Visually it’s impressive, which you expect from a 50s Universal-International western. The location shooting is very good.

The action scenes are handled well.

Not every movie has to be ground-breaking. Not every movie has to redefine the genre. This is not The Searchers or Rio Bravo. But there’s nothing wrong with well-crafted movies that meet our genre expectations and deliver solid entertainment. And Gunsmoke does that. Highly recommended.

I don’t think Gunsmoke is available on Blu-Ray but it looks quite OK on DVD.

Kansas Raiders (1950)

Kansas Raiders is a 1950 Universal-International western starring Audie Murphy and a very interesting western it is too.

Murphy plays a very young Jesse James. Now you have to remember that this is a Hollywood movie so it has zero interest in historical accuracy. Don’t assume that it’s going to follow the real-life story of Jesse James in any way, shape or form. That’s a particularly important point to bear in mind with this movie since any assumptions you may make about James as either a hero or a villain will lead you astray.

It is 1863, the middle of the Civil War. The movie opens out west, with a group of young men heading for the headquarters of the famous (or infamous) guerrilla leader Quantrill (Brian Donlevy). They want to join up. Quantrill’s admirers see him as a brave and bold warrior for the Confederacy. His detractors regard him as the leader of a gang of thieves and murderers.

Jesse James as we see him in the early part of this movie is a very likeable very pleasant young man. The sort of young man we expect to see as the hero in a western. He rescues a young lady when her horses bolt and both she and her cart seem headed for disaster. He’s the kind of young guy who saves the lives of ladies in peril.

And then suddenly we get a glimpse of a darker side to him. It’s a scene that has been repeated in countless westerns and adventure films. The hero has to fight a duel, in this case a fight to the death with knives, with a man who has tried to bully and insult him. We know what will happen. The hero will win, the bad guy will be disarmed and lying helpless waiting for the killing blow, and of course the hero will let him live because heroes do not kill helpless unarmed men. But in this case Jesse unhesitatingly delivers the killing blow. It’s a shocking moment of ruthless violence that you just don’t see in Hollywood movies in 1950. This is clearly going to be an unusual western.

There is more brutal violence to come. There are several scenes in which unarmed men who have surrendered are ruthlessly gunned down.

Jesse is appointed an officer in Quantrill’s guerrilla army. Jesse’s admiration for Quantrill knows no bounds. Then disillusionment starts to set in. Quantrill’s guerrilla army really is nothing more than a band of cut-throats and murderers. This is indicative of the overall mood of cynicism in this movie. There’s a Union guerrilla army, known as the Red Legs, operating in the same territory. They are also cut-throats and murderers. In fact Jesse has first-hand experience of the Red Legs. They slaughtered most of his family a few weeks earlier. Jesse is obsessed by thoughts of revenge. He is twisted up inside by hate. But he is at the same time fundamentally decent. He is a very conflicted young man. There’s some nice moral ambiguity in this movie.

There’s a definite cynicism towards war in this movie. Those who lead men to war talk of glory and honour but in practice war is nothing more than butchery. This is a dark grim violent movie.

This movie sets itself a difficult problem from the outset but it’s the way it tackles that problem that makes it such a fascinating movie. The focus is on young Jesse James and his brother Frank and their three buddies who would later go on to be the core of the James Gang. Jesse is very much the protagonist. We have to be able to relate to him. These young man have to be presented in a reasonably sympathetic light but they would go on to violent criminal careers and the movie itself focuses on their activities as party of a notorious band of thieves and murderers. The solution adopted was to portray them as innocents misled into wrongdoing by the charismatic evil Quantrill. And in particular Jesse is portrayed as being totally under the spell of Quantrill - he has a romantic notion of Quantrill as a brave fighter for freedom.

Of course as the truth about Quantrill becomes increasingly obvious Jesse becomes more and more conflicted and tortured. Jesse just cannot accept that he has become complicit in evil. This makes it a complex demanding part for Audie Murphy. Is Jesse a tragic hero or a tragic villain? He’s a bit of both. Murphy does a fine job. We might be exasperated by Jesse but at the same time we admire his loyalty to Quantrill, even if it’s tragically misguided loyalty.

Quantrill is evil, but he is also deluded. He seems to really believe that he is going to be the saviour of the South. It’s possible that at one time he really was a hero but he has spiralled downwards into self-delusion and fantasy.

A romance angle has been added. The woman (Kate, played by Marguerite Chapman) Jesse rescued at the start of the film turns up again at Quantrill’s headquarters. The movie has to be rather coy about her status. She is clearly Quantrill’s woman but that cannot be made too obvious.

The ending is really interesting and very effective.

Kansas Raiders is an exceptionally interesting western and it’s highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray transfer looks superb.

Destry (1954)

Destry is 1954 Audie Murphy western based on a novel by Max Brand. There were two film adaptations in the 1930s including a fairly admired 1939 version (with the title Destry Rides Again) directed by George Marshall. In 1954 Marshall directed another version, simply called Destry, with Audie Murphy in the role played by James Stewart in the ’39 film. This is the film reviewed here.

I’ve seen the 1939 movie but it was so long ago that I was able to approach this 1954 remake with an open mind.

Restful is the name of the town but restful it ain’t. It’s run by a very shady businessman and gambler named Decker (Lyle Bettger). Decker has the crooked Mayor Sellers (Edgar Buchanan) is his pocket and a gang of gunmen.

Restful is without a sheriff after the previous holder of that office, Sheriff Joe Bailey, suffered a fatal heart attack. That’s what it says on the death certificate but the death certificate neglected to mention that by an amazing coincidence the heart attack happened at the exact same moment that the sheriff got a bullet in the back. This occurred shortly after a dispute over a poker game in which Decker cheated Henry Skinner (Walter Baldwin) out of his ranch. Decker cheated with some help from sexy saloon girl and chanteuse Brandy (Mari Blanchard).

To ensure that they have no problems with nosy sheriffs Decker and the major appoint hopeless drunk Rags Barnaby (Thomas Mitchell) as sheriff. Rags then has a brainwave. Years earlier, before he crawled inside a bottle, Rags had been the deputy of a legendary sheriff named Destry. Destry had a son, Tom. Rags hasn’t seen the son for years but he figures he’s bound to be a tough two-fisted fast-shooting lawman.

When Tom Destry (Audie Murphy) arrives in town all Rags’ hopes are dashed. Tom is a quiet inoffensive young man who looks like he would faint if he saw a gun. And Tom makes it clear that as deputy he has no intention of carrying a gun. Tom is a tenderfoot who will clearly be no use at all.

Appearances are of course deceptive. Tom Destry doesn’t carry a gun and he doesn’t believe in shooting people but underneath the gentle bookish exterior there is steel. Destry is tough and brave. He’s just not tough and brave in a way that involves shooting people. And he’s smart. Why try out-shooting criminals when you can out-think them?

Destry is determined to clean up Restful, and bring the murderer of Sheriff Bailey to justice.

This is the sort of thing Audie Murphy did particularly well, playing an unconventional hero. He plays this hero as a seriously nice guy but he convinces the viewer that Destry is actually quite formidable in his own way. And of course Audie Murphy had a very high likeability factor. I think Murphy’s performance works just fine.

Mari Blanchard has a tougher challenge, playing the role played by Marlene Dietrich in the ’39 film. She’s no Dietrich but she’s not pretty good. She gets several musical numbers which she handles well enough.

Thomas Mitchell as Rags and Edgar Buchanan as the sleazy mayor are of course huge amounts of fun. Wallace Ford as the town’s incompetent doctor and Alan Hale Jr as a hot-headed cattleman are also excellent. Lori Nelson gets saddled with the thankless good girl role but she’s OK.

As I said earlier I have only dim memories of the 1939 Destry Rides Again so I can’t compare the two movies. Judged on its own merits Destry is a pretty good western. Recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray (in their Audie Murphy Collection II boxed set) offers a nice transfer. Being a 1954 Universal International release the movie was shot in Technicolor and looks great.

I’ve seen and reviewed quite a few Audie Murphy westerns. Their quality is variable but Murphy’s performances are always good. Hell Bent for Leather (1960) and No Name on the Bullet (1959) are superb. Ride Clear of Diablo (1954) and the Don Siegel-directed The Duel at Silver Creek (1952) are reasonably OK.

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952)

I’ve become a keen fan of Audie Murphy’s westerns. The Duel at Silver Creek is a fairly early one (from 1952) and it’s directed by Don Siegel which makes it sound promising.

To begin with it seems like very much a stock-standard B-western. Claim jumpers are not just forcing miners to relinquish their claims, they’re murdering them afterwards so there will be no witnesses. One of their victims is Luke Cromwell’s dad and since Luke is played by Audie Murphy we can be pretty sure that the young man is going to do something about this. In fact he’s already started on the project, killing three of the claim jumpers before they make their escape.

So this is a standard revenge western set-up.

We also know that Luke has a taste for poker, which will be important later.

What has to be said in the movie’s favour right from the start is that it packs an extraordinary amount of action into the first ten minutes or so. And the body count is already climbing (it will climb a good deal higher).

Audie then disappears for a while and the focus shifts to Silver City’s marshal, Lightning Tyrone (Stephen McNally). He’s put together a posse to go after the claim jumpers, leaving his dad in charge of the town as a deputy.

Since he’s leaving his lady love Dusty (Susan Cabot) behind and the sinister sleazy Johnny Sombrero (Eugene Iglesias) is taking an unhealthy interest in the young lady we have to wonder if it’s a wise move on Lightning’s part to leave the town with only an old man to keep order. We know what always happens in westerns when such a situation occurs.

The posse finds the jumpers but Lightning manages to get himself shot straight away and the jumpers escape. Lightning is taken to a nearby Army post to recover from a fairly minor wound. While he’s there the claim jumpers’ latest victim is brought in and he’s still alive. Finally it looks like the marshal has a living witness.

Then things start to get more interesting. An angel of mercy appears on the scene, a pretty young woman with nursing experience to volunteers to help care for the wounded miner.

But she’s no angel of mercy. Opal Lacy is a bad girl. In fact she’s a really bad girl. The arrival of a bad girl in any movie is always guaranteed to spark my interest. Even better, the bad girl is played by Faith Domergue, in my opinion a very fine actress who deserved a much better career.

Lightning arrives back in town and he’s out to find a killer. There are two obvious suspects - Johnny Sombrero and a stranger who just recently rode into town. The stranger is a young punk of a poker player who is also incredibly fast with a gun. He goes by the name of the Silver Kid. And the Silver Kid is none other than Audie Murphy. Luke Cromwell has undergone a bit of a transformation.

To our surprise, and to his even greater surprise, the Kid soon finds himself wearing a deputy’s badge.

And Opal Lacy has turned up in Silver City. Lightning had taken a shine to her at the Army post and now he’s even more interested. Lightning still doesn’t know the identity of the killer he’s after and he has a bigger problem than that. That bullet wound in the shoulder means he can still draw as fast as ever but he can’t squeeze the trigger.

Lightning is an experienced lawman but he jumps to conclusions and he has a mind that can best be described as plodding. The Silver Kid might seem like he’s still wet behind the ears but he’s much smarter than the marshal and he has the kind of suspicious mind that a good lawman needs. Poor Lightning just gets led by the nose and his lack of perceptiveness is likely to get him into a world of trouble.

Don’t expect any complex characterisation in this movie. Every character is a standard western type. Stephen McNally is fine as the marshal. Susan Cabot is very good. Lee Marvin has a small rôle as a rambunctious gambler. A year later Marvin would attract a lot more attention in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and he’d go on to make appearances in western classics like 7 Men From Now (1956). It’s not a complex rôle for Audie Murphy but he has that characteristic Audie Murphy brand of charisma going for him. Faith Domergue makes a most satisfactory femme fatale type. And she has one absolutely chilling scene. The cast have little to work with but they do what they can.

This movie really does turn out to be very much a routine B-western. On the plus side Don Siegel handles the action scenes competently. The secret to making successful B-movies is to keep things moving along so quickly that the audience doesn’t have time to notice dodgy production values or a threadbare script. In this case the script is very threadbare and very clichéd indeed but Siegel maintains a frantic pace and throws in lots of action.

The Duel at Silver Creek is not by any stretch of the imagination a top-tier western. It’s not even a top-tier B-western. But it looks good and it can be fun waiting to see which western cliché the script will offer up next. It’s a movie version of junk food. No nutritional value but you’ll get the desired sugar rush. And there are times when one really craves junk food, and if you’re having such a craving then The Duel at Silver Creek is recommended.

This is one of three movies in the recent Kino Lorber Audie Murphy western Blu-Ray boxed set. The set also includes the superb No Name on the Bullet (1959) and the very good Ride a Crooked Trail (1958). This is a set very much worth buying. The Duel at Silver Creek gets an excellent transfer.

Ride a Crooked Trail (1958)

Ride a Crooked Trail is a 1958 Audie Murphy western and as it happens Audie Murphy westerns are one of my current enthusiasms.

The screenplay is by Borden Chase, one of the greats when it came to writing screenplays for intelligent complex westerns. His credits include Red River for Howard Hawks and films like Winchester ’73, Bend of the River and The Far Country for Anthony Mann. The guy knew how to write a script for a western.

The classic way to start a western is to have a mysterious stranger ride into town. That’s the way this one starts, with Audie Murphy as the mysterious stranger. Having the mysterious stranger immediately in trouble due to mistaken identity is a pretty standard western feature as well. That happens here as well. But with a few interesting twists.

A bank robber named Joe Maybe is on the loose so when Audie arrives Judge Kyle (Walter Matthau) figures he might be that bank robber. Then the judge sees the badge that Audie is carrying and realises his mistake. This mysterious stranger is the legendary Marshal Joe Noonan. He has the badge and he has identification papers. Only he isn’t Marshal Noonan. It won’t take long for viewers to figure out that he is really Joe Maybe.

Joe Noonan is dead. But Joe Maybe didn’t kill him. Joe Maybe is a bank robber and he undoubtedly has quite a criminal record but he didn’t kill Joe Noonan.

Judge Kyle is happy to have a Marshal in town to help him keep order. Not that the judge has too much trouble keeping order. Judge Kyle knows how to deal with trouble.

The judge is a bit of a cheerful rogue but he keeps order in his own highly individualistic manner and his town is thriving, peaceful and happy.

One of the great western clichés is that the good guys always play by the rules. If the good guy gets into a gunfight he’ll make sure it’s a good clean fight with the bad guy given a sporting chance. Judge Kyle doesn’t go in for any of that nonsense. He believes you should never ever give the other guy an even break. And he quickly demonstrates his methods. They’re pretty drastic and they’re very unsporting but they certainly work.

Maybe and the judge get along pretty well together but the judge is no fool. He knows there’s something not quite right here. He has his suspicions about his new marshal who claims to be Joe Noonan.

Then Tessa Milotte (Gia Scala) arrives on the river steamer. She’s the girlfriend of notorious bank robber Sam Teeler (Henry Silva). She and Joe Maybe know each other pretty well. Joe has always had a hankering to take Tessa away from Teeler but as she keeps reminding Joe if he tried something like that Teeler would kill them both.

Tessa and Joe have to pretend to be married. The judge has provided them with a nice little house and then they acquire a kid named Jimmy. Jimmy is a ward of the court. Judge Kyle is raising him but the judge isn’t exactly an ideal substitute father even when he’s sober. Jimmy decides to move in with Joe and Tessa. To all outward appearances Joe and Tessa are now totally respectable.

Joe proves himself to be an effective lawman. He’s almost starting to like the respectable life. He likes this town. He likes the people. He likes Judge Kyle. He likes Jimmy. He’s reasonably content being the town marshal. He knows it’s a job he’s capable of doing. Joe was born in a saloon. His mother was a whore. She died and the other girls in the whorehouse raised him. He’s never been respected before.

But the fact remains that he’s Joe Maybe, a wanted man. And Judge Kyle clearly suspects something along those lines.

Then Sam Teeler shows up, with plans to rob the town’s bank. Teeler’s plan is that Joe is going to take part in the robbery.

Joe is deeply conflicted. He really isn’t sure which way he wants to jump. He’d like to escape his past but he knows that isn’t likely to be possible. When the time comes for the robbery he’ll have to make his choice.

Walter Matthau is in delightfully outrageous form, stealing every scene he’s in. Judge Kyle is a wonderful character. His methods are perhaps not entirely honourable but that’s why he’s still alive. Being a frontier judge isn’t for the faint-hearted. If you stick rigidly to the rules you’ll wind up dead and your town will go down the gurgler.

Acting opposite Walter Matthau without being overshadowed is a challenge but Audie Murphy holds his own. His characteristically low-key performance meshes surprisingly well with Matthau’s acting pyrotechnics. Murphy was a talented actor and could be rather subtle and this is a part that requires subtlety.

Gia Scala gives a fine performance as Tessa. Tessa is a female equivalent of Joe. She’s a bad girl who starts to wonder if she could become a good girl, and wonders whether she’d like that or not. As you’d expect Henry Silva makes a fine heavy.

This is certainly not a comedy but there’s a healthy leavening of humour. For most of its running time it’s a good-natured movie. Joe Maybe is the bad guy but he’s a nice guy. He’s not just superficially charming. He really is a nice guy. We are therefore going to be hoping that somehow Joe will find a way out of the ticklish position he’s in. We hope he’ll find redemption. And we hope that it won’t cost him his life although we fear that it might.

There’s no shortage of action and the action scenes are well staged.

Jesse Hibbs directed. He directed B-movies in Hollywood before moving into television. It was an unremarkable career but on the strength of this movie I’d say he was pretty competent. The movie was shot in colour and in Cinemascope. It doesn’t have the grandeur of westerns directed by guys like Mann, Ford or Boetticher. It looks like a B-movie, but a solidly crafted B-movie.

This is one of three movies in the recent Kino Lorber Audie Murphy western Blu-Ray boxed set. The transfer is just fine.

Ride a Crooked Trail has just enough complexity, with Joe Maybe’s inner conflicts and the extreme trickiness of his situation, to keep us interested. Audie Murphy’s performance is more than merely competent, Walter Matthau is terrific. This is not one of the great westerns but it’s a fine movie and it’s very entertaining. Highly recommended.

Hell Bent for Leather (1960)

George Sherman’s Hell Bent for Leather is a 1960 Audie Murphy western released by Universal-International. It’s a movie about an innocent man who finds himself hunted for a crime he knows nothing whatever about. It’s a case of mistaken identity, with some twists. It’s a theme that has been tackled countless times but it’s handled faultlessly here.

Clay Santell (Audie Murphy) is a horse dealer. A perfectly honest legitimate horse dealer. When a man wanders into his campsite looking half dead Santell naturally offers him water but the man steals Santell’s horse. Santell takes a shot at him. The man rides off but he drops his shotgun. It’s a real fancy shotgun. Santell naturally picks up the shotgun and starts walking. He reaches a small town but when the townsfolk see that shotgun they get really edgy and uncomfortable.

Then Santell finds himself accused of being Travers, a escaped convict who killed two of the townspeople a couple of days before. Travers always carries a shotgun, just like the one that Santell is now carrying.

Then Marshall Deckett (Stephen McNally) arrives. Santell assumes his problems are over. Deckett has spent four months tracking Travers. He knows what Travers looks like. The whole misunderstanding will be cleared up.

But that’s not what happens. Deckett intends to take him to Denver to be hanged even though he knows he’s got the wrong man. When Santell figures out why Deckett is doing this he realises just how bad a situation he’s in.

Santell gets away but he’s now a hunted man. And the girl is hunted as well. The girl is Janet (Felicia Farr). Initially she’s unwilling to go with Santell but later she changes her mind. She believes Santell is innocent but there’s more to it than that, which we’ll find out later and I won’t spoilt things by giving any indication as to her motivations.

The main part of the movie is a manhunt story and it’s a manhunt played out in some impressive settings.

Interestingly Santell loses his gun really early on. For most of the movie he’s unarmed. He’ll have to rely on his wits and on steely determination. It’s fun seeing the way the movie deals with this problem - how can you have a climactic gunfight if the hero doesn’t have a gun? But it’s a western. There has to be a climactic gunfight. In fact the movie solves the problem pretty well.

Santell will also have to rely on Janet. And (for reason which become apparent fairly early on) she’ll have to rely on him. They need each other.

A good western always benefits from having a really nasty villain and this movie has a particularly vicious villain. The fact that the villain, Deckett, is a lawman makes things more interesting. I’m not going to hit at Deckett’s motivations save to say that he becomes increasingly obsessed, unhinged and out of control. It’s a fine performance by Stephen McNally.

Felicia Farr makes an excellent heroine. Janet has her own deeper motivations which Farr conveys to the viewer without going over-the-top.

Then there’s Audie Murphy. By this time he was an experienced actor and was perfectly capable of handling complex roles. His role here is not as demanding as the one he played in the superb No Name on the Bullet a year earlier but Murphy doesn’t put a foot wrong. He plays Clay Santell as a man who is bewildered by the situation he’s found himself in but he’s stubborn and has no intention of allowing himself to be railroaded. He’s not going to be gunned down like a dog.

Director George Sherman spent his career making mostly B-features but Hell Bent for Leather proves that he was more than competent. Sherman made a lot of westerns but a few notable non-westerns including the very fine 1948 film noir Larceny.

The movie was shot in colour and in the Cinemascope ratio. There’s some wonderful location shooting. This is a fine-looking movie. Clifford Stine did the cinematography and did a great job. This may not have been a big-budget picture but it demonstrates that if you have good locations and you know what you’re doing you can still make a top-notch western. Sherman and his crew knew what they were doing. Having a solid cast helps, and this movie has that as well.

Hell Bent for Leather isn’t a big movie. It isn’t an epic. It doesn’t deal with really big themes. It’s just an extremely well-crafted movie with an uncomplicated but very tight plot (courtesy of screenwriter Christopher Knopf) with the three lead performers (Murphy, Farr and McNally) all delivering excellent performances. Everything just works.

When I say there are no big themes that’s not to say that there’s no thematic content at all. If there’s a theme here is that grief and anger warp people’s judgment with often tragic consequences. The townspeople believe Santell is Travers because they want to believe it. They want to believe that they’ve found a dangerous murderer and now they’re going to hunt him down. They don’t want to stop and think things through. They don’t want to admit that Santell’s story of mistaken identity is entirely plausible. They just want to lash out. The movie makes its points without ever resorting to speech-making. The message is there and the audience doesn’t need to be beaten over the head with it.

The Region 2 DVD from 101 Films offers a superb anamorphic transfer.

Hell Bent for Leather is an unassuming western that could easily be overlooked but actually it’s a top-notch western and it’s highly recommended.

No Name on the Bullet (1959)

No Name on the Bullet is a 1959 Audie Murphy western, and is generally considered to be one of his best movies.

John Gant (Audie Murphy) rides into a quiet little town and spreads fear and panic. How does he do this? By taking a room at the hotel, drinking countless cups of coffee and playing the odd game of chess.

What terrifies the townsfolk is not Gant’s behaviour but his reputation. He is reputed to have killed thirty men, and he’s killed them all for money. He is not a wanted man. He has never been convicted of a crime. He is always able to persuade his victims to fight, in front of witnesses, and all his killings have technically in self-defence.

Almost every man in town is convinced that Gant has come to kill them. Every man has at least one enemy.

Pretty soon there are a lot of frightened men doing crazy things and becoming severely paranoid. A paranoia that can even lead to a man killing himself. A man who never was Gant’s intended victim. It can lead frightened men to start killing each other. It can tempt normally sane men to consider vigilante justice. The town is being torn apart.

The sheriff has no clue what to do. He can’t order Gant to leave town. The man has committed no crime.

The town’s do-gooder doctor Luke (Charles Drake) feels that he has to do something to stop the madness but he has no idea how to do it.

The idea of a hired killer who taunts his victims into drawing first and then guns them down was far from original but it is used here in an original way, and having such a cold-blooded killer as the protagonist, played by a very popular star, was certainly daring.

Audie Murphy was a war hero who had a troubled life, having never fully recovered from his wartime experiences. It’s ironic that he become so revered as a war hero, given that his wartime military service to a certain extent wrecked his life. He’s not generally all that highly regarded as an actor and is usually dismissed as a guy who really wasn’t much good in anything but westerns. His performance here suggests that there was more to him than that. He may have had a limited range as an actor but he certainly knew how to project menace in an impressively subtle way. He really does make John Gant seem very very dangerous, but without doing anything overt. This is a guy who terrifies people by sitting around drinking coffee and playing chess.

What is really impressive is that Murphy manages to make us like Gant. We care what happens to him.

Gant justifies his work by arguing that all the men he killed deserved killing. If someone hires a killer to kill a man then that man has probably done something pretty bad, and society might well be better off without him. Gant has the psychology of a 20th century hitman rather than a Wild West gunfighter. He kills scientifically and goes to incredibly elaborate lengths to ensue than no innocent bystander gets hurt. Gant kills for money, not because he likes killing. It’s just a job.

Luke can’t help liking him as well.

The ending is rather clever. The film was of course constrained by the Production Code but it gives us an ending that is not quite the predictable Production Code ending that we expect. There’s a nice ouch of ambiguity.

There are a few speechifying moments and Luke gets a bit tiresome with his self-righteousness.

Gene L. Coon’s screenplay is however intelligent and fairly complex. It throws some moral and ethical dilemmas at us without suggesting that there are easy answers. Even Luke’s self-righteousness gets shaken a little.

Director Jack Arnold was renowned as a director of 1950s science fiction movies that were usually a cut above the usual run of such movies.

It often amuses me when people talk about how revolutionary the so-called revisionist westerns of the late 60s and 70s were. There’s really not a single revolutionary thing in those movies that isn’t to be found in the classic Hollywood westerns of the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. If there was a clever twist that could be given to classic western themes then John Ford, Howards Hawks, Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher had almost certainly already thought of it. Moral ambiguity, flawed heroes, tortured heroes, ethical dilemmas, sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans, a questioning of the mythology of the Wild West - the old masters of the genre had given us all of these things.

And in No Name on the Bullet we get a genuine anti-hero.

Universal’s Region 1 DVD offers a very pleasing 16:9 enhanced transfer (the movie was shot in colour and in the Cinemascope aspect ratio).

I watched this movie based on a glowing recommendation at Riding the High Country.

No Name on the Bullet is an excellent grown-up western with an extraordinary charismatic performance by Audie Murphy. Highly recommended.