Raton Pass is a pretty good B+ Western, with Patricia Neal as an unusual and effective villain, who marries Dennis Morgan and ends up using a shady financier to take over the ranch that belongs to Morgan and his father (Basil Ruysdael) in New Mexico in 1880. Morgan vows to take back the ranch, with the help of Louis Jean Heydt and all his men, with whom he had previously been fighting over access to water. Neal gets help from gunfighter Steve Cochran and his gang and the range war begins, with warfare taking up most of the film, to an evocative score by Max Steiner. The family conflicts and shifting alliances are Shakespearean in their intensity, as Neal is shot in the back by Cochran, who was planning to take away the ranch from Neal. Morgan's father returns after going into exile (he felt that Morgan should have shot Neal and her lover when he discovered her betrayal) and Morgan takes up with a Mexican girl who had loved him from afar when they were both much younger.
Raton Pass was Marin's penultimate film after twenty years of (mostly B) films and fifty features. His style was classical without being particularly personal and he could make a compelling film when he had a good script and a good cinematographer, as he did in Raton Pass: Thomas Blackburn wrote the script from his own novel and Wilfred Cline did the cinematography.
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