Lew Ayres is an executive at a production facility in Mexico. When a payroll is robbed, he figures out where any thief would make a break for, and heads off to find Edwin Rand. Rand doesn't raise his hands, so Ayres fires. Rand says one arm is busted, and he didn't steal the money. Although the wound appears minor, Rand bleeds out and dies.
Ayres gets on the train at random and winds up in a small Mexican tank town, where he spots Teresa Wright. He goes to work for her on her run-down ranch. She discovers he was the man who killed Rand, her husband, and she torments him, so soon they are married. Then comes the time when Ayres decides that Rand didn't commit the robbery and goes in search of the actual robber.
The movie is buoyed up by the two leads and some fine direction by John Sturges, but the way Ayres' character is written, alternately brilliant and stupid, is infuriatingly inconsistent, shifting one way or t'other to suit the dictates of the plot. Checking over the reviews in the IMDb, I saw it praised as a "psychological western" and a "film noir western" and "thoughtful storytelling." What I saw was the worst sort of storytelling, in which usually reliable screenwwriter and producer Niven Bush decided he needed Ayres to do one thing in one scene, so he did, and something else in another scene, so he did. It's a story in which plot drives character instead of the other way around, and the actors are mostly good enough, and likable enough to make you accept it. Characters need to be consistent to be believable, and Ayres' character is not.
And how did Miss Wright shift from hating Ayres as the man who killed her husband to loving him enough to marry him? I still don't get that.
Ayres gets on the train at random and winds up in a small Mexican tank town, where he spots Teresa Wright. He goes to work for her on her run-down ranch. She discovers he was the man who killed Rand, her husband, and she torments him, so soon they are married. Then comes the time when Ayres decides that Rand didn't commit the robbery and goes in search of the actual robber.
The movie is buoyed up by the two leads and some fine direction by John Sturges, but the way Ayres' character is written, alternately brilliant and stupid, is infuriatingly inconsistent, shifting one way or t'other to suit the dictates of the plot. Checking over the reviews in the IMDb, I saw it praised as a "psychological western" and a "film noir western" and "thoughtful storytelling." What I saw was the worst sort of storytelling, in which usually reliable screenwwriter and producer Niven Bush decided he needed Ayres to do one thing in one scene, so he did, and something else in another scene, so he did. It's a story in which plot drives character instead of the other way around, and the actors are mostly good enough, and likable enough to make you accept it. Characters need to be consistent to be believable, and Ayres' character is not.
And how did Miss Wright shift from hating Ayres as the man who killed her husband to loving him enough to marry him? I still don't get that.