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Don Siegel's montage-artist apprenticeship is clear in the prologue, where a claim-jumping gang's reign of terror is compressed into swift, hard slashes. Their latest casualty is an old prospector, whose offspring (Audie Murphy) begins a new life as a revenge-minded gambler known as "The Silver Kid." (Narration echoes Huston's famous description of the cherubic war vet: "He didn't have the face of a killer, but he had the cold, still look of one.") The marshal (Stephen McNally) needs a deputy to back up his damaged trigger finger, the sullen lad in black leather fits the bill. The other newcomer in town is a refined belle (Faith Domergue), "sister" to the outlaw leader (Gerald Mohr), displaying her fatale credentials by improvising a garrote from a wounded witness' own ascot. "You're scratching in the wrong place." "The only way to turn up worms is by scratching for them." A touch of the gangster picture in Siegel's first Western, a rocky frontier populated by cagy and treacherous nicknames. ("Johnny Sombrero" and "Rat Face" are typical handles for local dwellers.) A stream muddied up by charging hooves dissolves to the nascent community in extreme long shot, the camera pans left as a troop of cavalrymen gallops through in the distance and finds a row of cans stacked along the foreground, promptly picked off by bullets. Susan Cabot in tomboy denim is Murphy's gal, his nemesis is Lee Marvin grinning with stogie at the poker table: "When are you gonna start shavin', kid?" It builds to a particularly vicious shootout (the hero crashes through a cabin's window and guns down a foe in a dandy flash of action), and an embrace as the monikers are dropped at last. With Eugene Iglesias, James Anderson, Walter Sande, George Eldredge, and Griff Barnett.
--- Fernando F. Croce |