It seems like Randolph Scott made a million of these near-homogenous Westerns in the 40s and 50s. Every time one pops up on the schedules – which they regularly do (usually on a weekday afternoon when they're frequently interrupted by excitable chaps selling cheap loans or offering to make you rich for tripping over your own feet, or actresses you thought were dead selling life insurance to the over 50s, or riding very slowly on a stairlift) - I think I must have seen it already, but it seems like I never have
Anyway, this is a fairly typical example of his work, although a couple of truncated scenes suggest that Ray Enright's direction was found lacking during post-production. Randy's a man on a mission to hunt down the cad who murdered his fiancée. He's provided with clues to the killer's identity by a central-casting redskin whose brief sentences comprising of mostly two-syllable words ending in A somehow translate into fulsome paragraphs when translated into English. He travels around the old West until he comes to the town of Coroner Creek where he finally finds his man, and you can guess the rest
Except you can't really, because the film's only half-an-hour old by the time Scott stumbles upon icy, steely-eyed George Macready, and instead of facing him down in a showdown, Scott's character embarks on a crusade of psychological pressure that slowly whittles away at Macready's self-satisfied hold over the eponymous town. In the hands of a more accomplished writer and director this could have made for a more compelling movie than we actually have but, like I say, it's entertaining enough. There's the regulation sidekick whose loyalty to the hero inevitably proves to be fatal, an ageing widow whose crush on Scott is barely alluded to (suggesting further deleted scenes) until he leaves her, an ineffectual sheriff, a fetching hotel manageress (and you just know where that's going to end – it's been 18 months after all) and a small coterie of secondary villains who all fall foul of Scott sooner or later.
Anyway, this is a fairly typical example of his work, although a couple of truncated scenes suggest that Ray Enright's direction was found lacking during post-production. Randy's a man on a mission to hunt down the cad who murdered his fiancée. He's provided with clues to the killer's identity by a central-casting redskin whose brief sentences comprising of mostly two-syllable words ending in A somehow translate into fulsome paragraphs when translated into English. He travels around the old West until he comes to the town of Coroner Creek where he finally finds his man, and you can guess the rest
Except you can't really, because the film's only half-an-hour old by the time Scott stumbles upon icy, steely-eyed George Macready, and instead of facing him down in a showdown, Scott's character embarks on a crusade of psychological pressure that slowly whittles away at Macready's self-satisfied hold over the eponymous town. In the hands of a more accomplished writer and director this could have made for a more compelling movie than we actually have but, like I say, it's entertaining enough. There's the regulation sidekick whose loyalty to the hero inevitably proves to be fatal, an ageing widow whose crush on Scott is barely alluded to (suggesting further deleted scenes) until he leaves her, an ineffectual sheriff, a fetching hotel manageress (and you just know where that's going to end – it's been 18 months after all) and a small coterie of secondary villains who all fall foul of Scott sooner or later.