Richard Thorpe made 182 movies in his long career, starting in 1923 with Rough Ridin' and ending in 1967 with the appropriately named The Last Challenge. Most of Thorpe's career was spent at MGM, where he did Tarzan movies as well as Lassie and Thin Man films. He was known for working quickly and below budget and few of his films were particularly memorable -- with the possible exception of Night Must Fall (1937), from an Emlyn Williams play.
The Last Challenge is in many ways an iconic Western and Thorpe was always comfortable with such relatively generic films. There are brothels and dancehall girls, a whore with a heart of gold (played by Angie Dickinson), a poker game with a crooked dealer, wild Indians seduced by whiskey, an aging sheriff (Glenn Ford) and the young gunfighter who wants to challenge him (Chad Everret). This was a point where the Western was being taken over by television and Italian directors and Thorpe enjoyed the "last challenge," shooting on location in widescreen and color (cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks) from a screenplay by John Sherry, who wrote the source novel "Pistolero's Progress."
TCM has been showing a number of Glenn Ford films recently and I have found him to be intensely low-key in Western roles, where as he grew older he effectively played aging gunfighters who wanted to settle down as the frontier was closing but had difficulty overcoming their past. As Ford rides out of town at the end of The Last Challenge, with Angie Dickinson watching him with tears in her eyes, there is no place left for him to go.
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