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Richard C. Sarafian likes an incongruous image, the gentlewoman riding into the sagebrush plain with parasol in hand carries on the surrealism of the ship on wheels from Man in the Wilderness. The train robbery goes as planned except for a casualty or two, afterwards the gang leader (Burt Reynolds) chastises the trigger-happy cohort (Jack Warden). "I told you I didn't want anybody killed back there." "Yeah... Well, I forgot." The derivation from Mann's The Naked Spur has the runaway wife (Sarah Miles) captured during the escape, the posse in pursuit includes her fancy-pants husband (George Hamilton). The journey, with pit stops in ghost towns and Shoshone camps as the cold encroaches, is described as "full of surprises" by the weary Wells Fargo detective (Lee J. Cobb). A liberated-woman fantasy within a revisionist Western, as befits Eleanor Perry's screenplay negotiated with Sarafian's rugged physicality, an Aldrichian mating of the brutal and the lyrical. Her sunburned skin smeared with mud, her dusty torso dunked in the stream, the Victorian lady patiently boiled down to emotive instinct. (She smiles in private triumph as she masters a bird call imitation while munching on jerky.) "Just how long will a body last out there?" The desperado was once an Army captain, the title refers to the name of the indigenous wife who, like Hitchcock's Rebecca, haunts the tale posthumously. Their union is a precarious interlude in an abandoned mining commune, invaded by the vicious accomplice and demolished in the ensuing tussle. Nature in undiffused winter light provides the vast backdrop for her need for independence and his hope for redemption, their wounded embrace rattles in the void. "The white men never learn. Leave out best parts of story." Hellman works out the situation his own way in China 9, Liberty 37. With Bo Hopkins, Robert Donner, Nancy Malone, Jay Varela, Jay Silverheels, Larry Littlebird, and James Hampton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |