I find it absurd to compare Robert Evans with Richard Widmark in ' Kiss of Death ' which had a similar plotline as this film. Widmark succeeded in keeping his sneer and laugh as repetitive mannerisms and the audiences loved him for it. Evans left films as an actor, and his portrayal of the crazed and perverted killer was brilliantly conceived. I have seen no other performance quite like it and that is a compliment. Slightly camp, dangerously sexy he turned the ' fiend ' into a horrifically amusing tour de force of a part. Hugh O' Brian is good and Evans twists him around his ringed finger in a game of come on, suggesting literally unspeakable desires with women. As long as he is there of course. Fixated on O'Brian he terrifies the man's wife, shoots an arrow into an old woman and except for the arrow the violence is not as brutal as critics of the time condemned it to be. Gordon Douglas the fine director conveys a lot of black humour, but the UK censor promptly gave it an X certificate ( the first adults only certificate for a Western ) and everyone seeing it due to horror promotion expected the worst. Personally I have seen an equal amount of violence and nastiness in Westerns before this one, and children with an adult could see them. For example in the applauded John Ford ' She Wore A Yellow Ribbon a man is hauled alive over a fire, screaming until he dies. Nothing in ' The Fiend Who Walked the West ' quite compares with that! Sadly this film has slipped into deliberate obscurity and I saw it recently on YouTube with French subtitles. The French brought it out on DVD years ago, and I have it proudly in my collection. ' Fiend ' is crazy, tinged with perverse sexuality and non stated desires. It is also due to Evans crazily amusing, and way, way over the top. Viewers see it with a sense of humour and do not take it seriously. As I write this I am watching ' Canyon Passage ' and have just seen a woman and child killed brutally and long distance sculping. This film could be seen by children on their own with a ' U ' certificate. Censorship can be as cruelly funny as this underrated film.
Review of The Fiend Who Walked the West
