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Between classicism and modernity, a genre at dusk: "You see, this fellow and I are kind of bound up with each other." Robert Aldrich has many themes to work with, the point of departure is an early detail from The Searchers as the desert wanderer rides up to the ranch of his estranged beloved, now married. The stunted smiler in tight-fitting black (Kirk Douglas) has a coolly vengeful lawman (Rock Hudson) on his trail, a showdown awaits them in Texas but in Mexico they have cattle to wrangle together. The ideal maiden is now a complicated woman (Dorothy Malone) uninterested in rekindling old flames, her pooch promptly sniffs out the outlaw suitor but her teenage kitten (Carol Lynley) is less leery. "I never really met an American cowboy." "You'd be disappointed." As assuredly as Vera Cruz foresaw Peckinpah, Aldrich here demonstrates the transition to Leone. Open vistas, claustrophobic relationships—everyone knotted up with unwholesome backstories. sorted out with perverse lyricism. A memory of Gettysburg, the soused cuckold is a Virginian former officer (Joseph Cotten), gunned down in the saloon but not before knowledge of a retreating ass. Neville Brand and Jack Elam amid the bandits, introduced in profile like a rotter's Mount Rushmore then vanquished during a sandstorm, the better to focus on the pathology of the singing desperado. "A new smell to follow" at the campfire fiesta, she comes barefoot in her mother's yellow dress to set up the bombshell that follows. (The aftermath rests on the subtle facial resemblance of Douglas and Lynley, remembered three decades later by Nicholson in The Two Jakes.) "Babies being christened, women burying their dead," so it goes in this rare Western requiem, all the way to the duel between gunslingers who no longer hate each other (cp. Melville's Le Samouraï). With Regis Toomey, James Westmoreland, and Adam Williams.
--- Fernando F. Croce |