|
"The old, old story of hate, murder and revenge," Fritz Lang's most concentrated laboratory experiment on the Western. (The ballad form is concurrent with High Noon, though the abstruse artifice is closer to Les Enfants du Paradis.) The open safe in a Wyoming general store doubles for the slain maiden (Gloria Henry) who "wasn't spared anything," the camera tilts down from her lifeless visage to the clenched hand still red from her violator's blood, her fiancé (Arthur Kennedy) begins his search. Magical words pepper the cowpoke's obsessive trek, "Chuck-a-luck" and "Altar Keane" for the bandit hideout in the mountains and the rancher-doyenne who might be the Marlene Dietrich of Destry Rides Again older and harder. (She's introduced astride a customer like a jockey for a bit of saloon racing, a passage as delirious and lewd as a Stroheim orgy.) "A pipe dream in blue jeans," her attention split between the covert avenger and the veteran gunslinger (Mel Ferrer). "I wish you'd go away... and come back ten years ago." Not open vistas but painted backdrops for Lang, for whom the West is another fatal landscape yet the vertical roulette in a gambling joint might be the mandala wheel. Civilization away from the outlaw sanctuary is a burg afire with hanging fever on election night, Ferrer shares a jail cell with crooked politicians and assures them that the noose is "a clean way to die, and as quiet as eating a banana." A song in the desert, a bullet for the queen, the edge of Technicolor fantasy further pursued in Moonfleet and culminated with the Indian epics. It ends with vengeance's empty hands, and consequences for Ray (Johnny Guitar) and Fuller (Forty Guns). "Look over there, through that window. Is that a courtyard or a graveyard?" Cinematography by Hal Mohr. With William Frawley, Lloyd Gough, George Reeves, Jack Elam, Francis McDonald, Frank Ferguson, Dan Seymour, Lisa Ferraday, John Kellogg, Rodd Redwing, John Doucette, Dick Elliott, and Russell Johnson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |