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The opening is a feint on Shane, the real experiment is Le Corbeau in the sagebrush, Jack Arnold sees it as another extraterrestrial invasion. A quiet frontier hamlet, the hired assassin (Audie Murphy) "not just passing through." He checks into the hotel and orders coffee, the townspeople speculate and sweat. "It's a rare man that hasn't made an enemy sometime in his life," mine owners (Karl Swenson, Whit Bissell) fret over betrayed partners, the clerk (Warren Stevens) is certain the stranger was sent by a vengeful cuckold. Impotent sheriff (Willis Bouchey) and tubercular judge (Edgar Stehli) ponder the unnerving presence of the gunslinger, who avouches an affinity with the local physician (Charles Drake): "You might say we're in related fields. I cure things, too." A budding community already rotten beneath its cozy surfaces, a sawed-off liquidator just watching citizens stew in their paranoid juices, a CinemaScope frame filled with Arnold's geometric interiors. "I have a certain interest in what you might call the municipal state of health." The assassin nurses a philosophical streak, and stares down a vigilante posse as dispassionately as he discusses justice and death with the doctor. Bergman with the chess game two years prior, Ionesco nearly concurrent with Tueur Sans Gages, Albee over the rise in the corrosive couple's ultimate punishment ("He's gonna let us stay together"). Above all, Murphy in an arresting study of baleful stillness, the prematurely hardened juvenile bringing down temperatures in every room while seemingly engaged in a private meditation on his own past as a sanctified killer. "Who's the villain in this piece?" The marred trigger hand rides away at the close, Eastwood takes it from there in High Plains Drifter. With Joan Evans, Virginia Grey, R.G. Armstrong, Simon Scott, Charles Watts, John Alderson, and Jerry Paris.
--- Fernando F. Croce |