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"Special talents" are needed during war, "strange dark figures rode under the flag of the Confederacy." Out of the gallows and into the infantry, an oath turns "killer" into "patriot": Cardsharp (Mike Connors), cattleman (Paul Birch), hothead (Jonathan Haze) and brother (R. Wright Campbell), leathery man of mystery (John Lund). The mission is to seize gold and turncoat from a Yankee stagecoach, wandering loyalties fill the desert. "Get your mind on too many things, you'll wind up with nothing." A single set, the isolated homestead run by the tough maiden (Dorothy Malone) and her tippling uncle (James Stone), otherwise Roger Corman is invigorated by the Western air of rock and sagebrush locations, the kind of crisp first film described by Kurosawa as "a picnic" (Sanshiro Sugata). Taut arrangements, Pathécolor thrown off by day-for-night filters, a sustained starkness occasionally relieved by pictorial appreciation of a lamp in close-up or Malone's blonde hair against a stucco wall. Wellman's Yellow Sky is abstracted for the benefit of Hellman, waiting and wanting are constants: "Wanting can be a hard thing, sometimes. It can ball up in a man's guts, like cactus spines. Man's got to rid himself of it." A sudden hoedown by the water pump, a miniature battlefield outside the stagecoach station, "just a little war of our own." Shootout under the floorboards (cf. Mann's The Far Country), dissolve from the fallen villain to dirt being shoveled on his grave from the same angle. Corman reworks the setup nearly one decade later in The Secret Invasion. With Jack Ingram, Larry Thor, and Boyd Franklin Morgan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |