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The rock-solid foundation is Ford's The Searchers to inform the bleak vision of mixed blood on the Texas prairie. Two Elvis Presley songs, one during the opening credits and another an impromptu indoor hoedown, after that he's a brooder in the lacerating Don Siegel mold. He has a Kiowa mother (Dolores del Rio) and a white father (John McIntire), which means having to take sides in the local war that explodes in the wake of a massacre. (The first attack is cannily staged as a lateral sprawl across the CinemaScope screen with a sloshed L.Q. Jones, until a screaming brave leaps into the frame with tomahawk in hand.) Conflicted brother (Steve Forrest), bellicose new chieftain (Rodolfo Acosta), "the people in the middle" feel the pressure. "If it comes down to a real showdown, are you with us or not?" The inner space of divided loyalties and the outer space of the endless desert, family and the sensible lass (Barbara Eden) are fragile mediators. The native village makes a stronger case for recruitment than the hostile settlement, "it's plain hate now," Siegel composes the skirmishes for visceral force and spiritual bitterness. The title is a harbinger of death, the mortally wounded mother ventures into the howling wind and dust clouds next to her weeping husband in a scene expanded by Peckinpah in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The troubadour in the sagebrush faces his last stand with fraternal blood as warpaint, a long way from John Wayne with a dubbed baritone in Lawless Range. "I've been killed already. Just stubborn about dyin'." Like Huston's concurrent The Unforgiven, it goes into Little Big Man. With Karl Swenson, Ford Rainey, Richard Jaeckel, Anne Benton, Douglas Dick, and Tom Reese.
--- Fernando F. Croce |