Russell Rouse's Wicked Woman 1953

My own all-time schlock favorite, particularly when pig-like Percy Helton is running his slobbering lips up the arm of wonderfully lurid Beverly Michaels.
--Andrew Sarris on Wicked Woman

Wicked Woman is an impressive portrait of the underbelly of America, full of sluts and perverts, dipsos and blackmailers, who live in furnished rooms with a bathroom and payphone in the hall. It stars Beverly Michaels, who only made eleven movies, but dominated them all with her statuesque body, big eyes, and moods that could switch from sweet to ferocious in a second.  The film represents a few weeks in Michaels' life, as she gets off a Greyhound at the beginning and leaves at the end with a bus that will take her as far as she can afford for twenty-nine dollars.

While Michaels is in town she tries to convince bar owner Richard Egan (from The Revolt of Mamie Stover, which I wrote about yesterday) to sell the bar (half-owned by Egan's alcoholic wife, Evelyn Scott, whose signature Michaels offers to forge).  Egan can't resist Michaels and agrees, until he finds Percy Helton kissing Michaels -- which she had only agreed to do to stop Helton's extortion attempt after Helton found out about the fraud -- and a rooming house brawl ensues.

This is the first film cinematographer Eddie Fitzgerald filmed and he and Rouse capture -- with their low-budget and minimal sets -- all the desperation of small towns and small town bars.  The film was written by Rouse and Clarence Greene, who had previously written the superb and fatalistic film noir D.O.A. (1949).

Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover 1956

Mamie Stover is Walsh's most important film of this decade [the fifties], revealing an emotional landscape in which he lets his guard down and creates pure vulnerability on the screen.  Mamie exists in a script with potholes, and she is pulled down by the weight of the world around her.  Yet she is a real woman, full bodied enough to capture the spectator with the full force of her honesty.
--Marilyn Ann Moss, Raoul Walsh (The University Press of Kentucky, 2011).

1956 was a terrific year for American movies -- John Ford's The Searchers, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now, Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, etc.-- as the power of studios and censorship were starting to weaken.  Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover, like many films of the period (including the ones I mentioned) takes a corrosive view of the myths of the American dream and class mobility.  Jane Russell gets kicked out of San Francisco in 1941 and sent to Hawaii, where she goes to work as a "hostess" (code word for prostitute) at The Bungalow, run by the bitter, butch and blonde Agnes Moorehead.  She and wealthy writer Richard Egan meet on the ship to Hawaii and fall in love, as he abandons his country-club girlfriend Joan Leslie. When the bombs hit Pearl Harbor Russell uses her money to buy up property cheaply and when Egan enlists in the army Russell swears to give up her hostess job.  But bitter Moorehead convinces her to stay with the job, at a considerably increased commission.  Egan sees cheesecake photos of Russell in the army and when he is injured he returns to Hawaii to confront Russell, where she fails to convince him of the importance of money to her, who grew up without it.

Walsh and Russell create a strong and assertive presence of a woman wanting to find her own way in the world, helped by an intelligent script by Sidney Boehm (who wrote Fritz Lang's The Big Heat in 1953), vivid color cinematography by Leo Tover and a vibrant score by Hugo Friedhofer.  

Max Allan Collins's Do No Harm

The grin kept going.  It was the kind of grin you got from a guy as he excused himself on his way to go blow his brains out. 
--Max Allan Collins, Do No Harm (Tom Doherty Associates, 2020).

Apparently there is a genre known as "true crime fiction," at which Max Allan Collins excels.  I have long had a predilection for fiction involving real people which crosses the arbitrary line between fiction and non-fiction. Collins has written many crime novels involving everyone from Mike Hammer to Eliot Ness but I like his Nate Heller novels the best; my favorite is Stolen Away (1991), a book that follows closely the known facts of the Charles Lindbergh Jr. kidnapping before deviating to come up with an imaginative solution to what actually happened.  Do No Harm handles the Sam Sheppard case in the same way, with private dick Nate Heller accidentally at the scene of the crime (his friend Eliot Ness lived near by) where "everybody and his duck still had access to this place" and hired by Sheppard's lawyers to investigate the murder of Sam Sheppard's wife (including F. Lee Bailey, who defended Sheppard in his second trial after the original trial conviction was overturned).  The novel is narrated in the first person by hard-boiled, cynical Heller, as he questions before each trial the many suspects in suburban Cleveland that knew the Sheppards, drawing an evocative picture of the 1950's and 1960's in "the mistake by the lake."

ballet in the plague year

I've already written about the performance of Balanchine's Jewels in Munich (March 26) and I am pleased to see that the New York City Ballet will be showing digital performances during their canceled Spring season, for which we had tickets for two matinees, both all-Balanchine:  Kammermusik #2, Concerto Barocco and Vienna Waltzes on one date and, on another, Donizetti Variations and Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto #2, all wonderful ballets that I was very much looking forward to.  

Certainly a ballet on tape will never come anywhere near a live performance, but I will get a chance to see some of the newer ballets that I was not able (or especially willing) to see, some of which I may want eventually to see live.  So far I have seen Christopher Wheeldon's This Bitter Earth, a pas de deux from Five Movements, Three Repeats and Justin Peck's Rotunda. The Wheeldon was intensely emotional, to the music of Dinah Washington singing This Bitter Earth (written by Clyde Otis), and the Peck was at least energetic, to a commissioned score by Nico Mulhy. Next week will be two works by Balanchine:  Apollo and Ballo della Regina.

The Battered Bastards of Baseball, 2014, directed by Chapman and Maclain Way

In 1973 actor Bing Russell (Bonanza, Rio Bravo) brought the A minor league team, The Mavericks, to Portland, Oregon, after MLB had moved the AAA Beavers to Spokane.  The Mavericks were an independent team in the Northwest Pacific League and held open tryouts, fielding a team of players rejected by the major leagues.  The Battered Bastards of Baseball is a documentary of the several years the Mavericks existed and created a huge fan base in Portland, Oregon, after which they were ousted by Major League Baseball and replaced by an AAA team.  Owner Bing Russell sued when he was offered $26,000 dollars for the territory and was awarded $206,000 by an arbitrator.

The documentary is a necessarily one-sided view of the Mavericks by two of Bing's grandsons, Chapman Way and Maclain Way, and includes extensive interviews with many of the players, including Bing's son actor Kurt Russell, who played for the team its first year, and also with manager Frank Peters.  There is a great deal of archive footage, including some of Jim Bouton, who was ostracized by MLB after his honest look at his years with the Yankees in Ball Four and started his comeback with The Mavericks, coining the term battered bastards. When it came time for the league playoffs the major league teams, who sponsored all the other teams in the league, sent down some of their players to make sure the upstart Mavericks did not win a championship.

I don't miss baseball so far this Spring as much as I thought I would but this film helps fill what void there is, as I read more, watch more movies and streaming opera and ballet and listen to classic dramas and comedies on the radio rather than listening to baseball games.

Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950)

Beginning with Winchester '73, a new simplicity and clarity entered his [Anthony Mann's] work, bringing with it the psychological intensity of the noir period, but realized in a more direct visual manner.
--Jeanine Basinger, Anthony Mann (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)

Winchester '73 was the first of five Westerns Mann made with James Stewart in the fifties, intense psychological dramas that harked back to the good-bad guy films of the silent film star William S. Hart while moving into complex combinations of good and evil.  Stewart is hunting the brother who shot their father in the back and finds him at a July 4th contest for a Winchester '73.  Stewart wins the contest but his brother (Stephen McNally) attacks him and steals the rifle.  After fleeing town McNally loses the rifle in a poker game, to a trader selling guns to the Indians, who in turn is killed by a chief who takes the gun and then loses it to a cavalry leader, who kills the chief with the help of Stewart when the Indians attack. Stewart and his pal (Millard Mitchell) leave and when cavalry leader (Jay C. Flippen) recovers the rifle he gives it to Lola Manners (Shelley Winters) and Steve Miller (Charles Drake) who are heading for their honeymoon home, where outlaw Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea) shoots Miller and takes the gun, which is taken again by McNally when they get together to plan a bank robbery.  Stewart and his pal interrupt the robbery and Stewart chases McNally into the hills where they shoot it our and Stewart wins both his Winchester and Lola.

In many ways Winchester '73 is an expansive Western -- with every thing from cavalry and Indians to dance hall girls and gunfights -- but its focus in always on the complicated character of Stewart and his relentless pursuit of revenge.  The extraordinary black-and-white cinematography of everything from crowded and dusty towns and saloons to empty prairies and rocky landscapes is by William Daniels, Greta Garbo's favorite cameraman, who painted with beautiful light and shadow.

Louis Malle's Acensceur pour l'echefaud 1958

Louis Malle's film Elevator to the Gallows was shown recently on TCM's Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Mueller.  It's not clear why he chose this film, made after film noir ended in America in 1955 with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly; perhaps because it showed the influence of American films on French films of this period, with a veteran of the wars in Algeria and Indochina instead of WWII and the Korean War.  It's beautifully shot in black-and-white by Henri Decae, who worked for most of the important French directors during this period:  Truffaut, Melville, Chabrol, et al.  It also has an extraordinary score by Miles Davis, who was perhaps better appreciated in France than America.

The film consists of three stories;  Julian Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), who kills his boss and then gets stuck for the night in the office elevator when he returns to retrieve a piece of important evidence, Florence Carala (Jean Moreau), the wife of Tavernier's boss who wanders the streets of Paris all night  after Tavernier fails to meet her after shooting her husband, and Louis and Veronique (Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin) who steal Tavernier's car and end up shooting two German tourists in a motel outside of Paris.  Malle and Decae film with mostly natural light on a rainy night.  The film effectively captures the mood of France after the defeat in Indochina and during the continued war in Algeria.

Norman Z. McLeod's The Paleface

"After seeing the preview of it I could have shot Norman McLeod.  I'd written it as a satire on The Virginian, and it was completely botched.  I could have killed that guy.  And I realized then that I must direct my own stuff."
--Frank Tashlin on The Paleface.

Once upon a time there were those who thought Bob Hope was funny but I was never among them.  I always found him bland and unappealing; he always played it safe and even in his movies he never worked with major directors, fearing that they would not want to use any of the lines his well-paid writers provided for him.  Frank Tashlin wrote Paleface and ended up directing two of Hope's best movies -- Son of Paleface (1948) and The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (1968) --that were successful because there were fewer of Hope's unfunny wisecracks and more physical comedy.  McLeod directed a couple of the Marx brothers anarchic comedies (Monkey Business in 1931 and Horse Feathers in 1932) but even those films were lacking in subtlety and visual style.  The most successful part of The Paleface is Jane Russell's straightforward performance as Calamity Jane, shooting Indians and bad guys and letting Hope think he did it.  The portrayal of Native Americans  is insensitive and offensive, with bodies stacked up like cordwood and it being unclear whether McLeod thought he was making some kind of parody.  Kudos to Ray Rennahan for his color cinematography, Mary Kay Dodson for her marvelous period costumes, and Victor Young for his low-key musical score.

Raoul Walsh's A Distant Trumpet 1964

Laziness and looseness deteriorated into something close to sloppiness in A Distant Trumpet, Walsh's last picture, which can be described as a shambles, even though it does contain some of the most breathtakingly staged and photographed battle scenes not only in Walsh's work but in the entire American cinema.
--Jean-Pierre Coursodon, American Directors (McGraw Hill, 1983)

By 1964 the studio system, which allowed many great American directors to flourish, was gone and directors were on their own.  Yesterday I wrote about Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport from 1964, a year that also included John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn and Raoul Walsh's A Distant Trumpet, films that explored some of the directors' themes and interests while struggling with a new generation of actors.  The film of Walsh's that is most like A Distant Trumpet is They Died with Their Boots On, 1941, that explored the relationship of the U.S. army to the Indians of the West.  Walsh, like Ford, was always sympathetic to the Indians and showed in both films how Indians were mistreated by the army as well as the traders who sold them whiskey and rifles.  Unfortunately Walsh was saddled with Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette in A Distant Trumpet, rather than Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland of the earlier film.  Walsh's understandable reaction was to emphasize the sweeping beauty of the Arizona landscape and the battles that took place there, beautifully photographed in color and widescreen by William Clothier --who also photographed Ford's Cheyenne Autumn -- with the impressive musical score of veteran Max Steiner, who also did the music for John Ford's The Searchers (1956).  The Indians are treated with dignity, speaking their own language, while James Gregory is the Latin-quoting general who passes on his knowledge and compassion to the new generation represented by Donahue.

Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport 1964

The most interesting feature of the film [Man's Favorite Sport] in relation to Hawks's past work is the character's development....If at the end of the film the hero is still (now literally) drifting, it is from choice, not mere misadventure.
--Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (Doubleday, 1968)

I have continued to look for movies that ages eight to seventy-three can enjoy together and failed again with Man's Favorite Sport, a comedy with Rock Hudson that had originally been written with Cary Grant in mind (aside: when I was a kid and never allowed to go to the movies I confused Cary Grant, Rock Hudson and Gregory Peck, which I find hard to believe today).  Nobody thought Man's Favorite Sport funny enough and Susan thought it an unsuccessful rehash of Bringing Up Baby (1939).  It is in many ways an old-fashioned film, which is not all bad.  One can even see the repeat of the restaurant scene from the earlier film, where Grant walks behind Hepburn to cover up the rip in the back of her dress, as an improvement, with Rock Hudson and Maria Perschy running into Hudson's fiancée with his tie caught in Perschy's zipper.  The film is full of sexual symbolism --such as a live fish wriggling in Hudson's pants --reflecting Hudson's insecure role of a fishing expert who had never been fishing and is forced to enter a fishing tournament.

There is no doubt that Hawks himself was somewhat adrift in post-studio Hollywood without a stable of character actors and always looking for new female talent that he could make into stars, as he did with Lauren Bacall. To a certain extent he succeeds with Paula Prentiss in Man's Favorite Sport but the rest of the cast is older men and younger unknown females..  And the Mancini/Mercer title song --"Man's Favorite Sport is Girls" -- has little to do with the film but, as Todd McCarthy points out in his biography of Hawks (Grove Press,1997) "Hawks commissioned the photographer Don Ornitz to create an elaborate title sequence for which he shot six thousand Playboyesque color photos of thirty-three unknown models in various athletic pursuits."

Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City, 1948

Cry of the City is a complex, multilayered story of immigrants, police, criminals, lawyers, men and women.  It is also very much about New York, just as Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722, which I have been reading lately) is about London.  As Anthony Burgess says, "One of the most remarkable things about the Journal is the way in which London is made to appear as a breathing, suffering entity and not just what Auden called 'an abstract civic space.'"  Cry of the City does the same for New York

In Cry of the City Siodmak combines his film noir style (see my posts of Aug 29 2016, Aug 4 2015, June 29 2015) with the 20th Century Fox documentary style of the forties, with much of the film taking place on rained-soaked streets.  Cop murderer Richard Conte escapes from jail and is pursued by cop Victor Mature, who also grew up in Little Italy.  Conte is quite a womanizer, getting a nurse (Betty Garde)to take a message to his lover (a young Debra Paget) and having Shelley Winters drive him to a crooked doctor when he escapes.  Conte ends up in tunnel after tunnel, literal and figurative, as he finds his way to masseuse Hope Emerson (one of a number of women of various ages who try to help Conte, including his mother) who makes a deal with Conte that neither of them keep.  Meanwhile Conte has killed two more people --a lawyer and his secretary -- in his attempt to get enough money to escape the country, even trying to get his younger brother to steal from their parents, as Conte travels through the streets, candy stores and subways of New York.  Siodmak and cinematographer Lloyd Ahern beautifully meld the indoor sets with the crowded and dangerous New York locations in an intense chiaroscuro black-and-white.





a

Maigret and the Old People by Georges Simenon 1960

Maigret wasn't necessarily following a logical order because nothing struck him as logical in this case, and he moved from one subject to another as if looking for the one spot.
--Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Old People, (translated by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin 1960)

This is one of the best Maigret novels I have read recently (Simenon wrote seventy-five novels about detective Mairget), as Maigret finds himself in a circle of wealthy and aristocratic old people when one of them is murdered just before he had a chance to marry the woman he had loved from afar for almost fifty years, during which they wrote to each other every day without ever meeting in person.  Maigret has barely figured out how these people thought and felt when he decides to do a paraffin test on Mademoiselle  Larrieu, who had been the murdered man's housekeeper for forty-six years. It comes back positive but Larrieu won't talk and only when her priest comes to visit her does the truth come out.

As always in Simenon there is much important detail, from the furnishing of a room to the food that is eaten and what the weather is like in Paris. Everyone that Maigret questions is vividly described in terms of appearance and character and the long romance between the murdered man, the Count of Saint-Hiliare, and Isabelle, Princess of V-----, is beautifully portrayed in the letters Maigret finds and reads.

Mark Sandrich's Melody Cruise 1933

Melody Cruise has a lot going for it as a pre-code romp on a boat from New York to California via the Panama Canal:  plenty of double and single entendres, scantily-clad women (mostly blonde), clever use of wipes and other tricky transitions by director Mark Sandrich, an amusing performance by the sputtering Charles Ruggles, impressive songs, including "He's Not the Marrying Kind" by Val Burton and Will Jason.  What Melody Cruise does not have is an effective leading man in the person of Phil Harris, a bandleader who made a few movies but was mainly a radio star, first with Jack Benny's show and then with "The Phil Harris and Alice Faye Show" when the two were married.

I do enjoy shipboard stories and romances, but I also prefer musicals that have room for plenty of dancing, which Melody Cruise does not have, though there is an "ice-skating dance" in the style of Busby Berkeley and choreographed by David Gould that has nothing to do with the plot   Director Mark Sandrich directed some the best Rogers and Astaire musicals, especially Shall We Dance (1937) with choreography by Hermes Pan (an uncredited assistant dance director on Melody Cruise) and music by George and Ira Gershwin, suggesting that the better his cast, choreographer, and songwriters were the better a director Sandrich was.

Pulp by Charles Bukowski 1994

I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get the wax out of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off my reading glasses. There were ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time I shaved. I hadn't laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about I got drunk. 
--Charles Bukowski, Pulp (Black Sparrow Press, 1994)

Pulp was the last of Charles Bukowski's six novels; he also published many volumes of poetry, short stories and essays.  In Pulp the narrator, private dick Nick Belane, describes the hallucinatory events leading up to his death.  I read Bukowski's first novel Post Office (1971) when I worked for the post office in the 70's and it is brilliantly funny in its accurate descriptions of the life of a postal worker, based on Bukowski's own ten years working as a letter carrier. Pulp is amusing in a totally different way, as the hallucinations of a dipsomaniac and a parody of Hemingway, Henry Miller and, especially, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), with its unreliable narrator.

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom

"You should see things through the eyes of common people, but your kind never will.  Do you think I would care for any Church after what I have seen of it all.?'
--Alice Fewterer, servant, talking to Matthew Shardake in Dissolution (Penguin, 2003)

It is the year 1537 in England and lawyer Matthew Shardake is commissioned by vicar general Thomas Cromwell to investigate a murder in a monastery in southern England.  Monks are being pensioned off as Henry VIII gradually replaces the Roman Catholic Church with the Church of England. Shardake is a diligent investigator, with the help of his protégé Mark Poer, but his investigation leads to his own disillusionment with the court and its use of fraud and torture to accomplish what they want, including the confiscation of land for their own benefit.

Sansome does an excellent job with the details of 16th century life and language, not only in the monasteries but also in the towns and villages.  I could do without the Agatha-Christie-style of murder investigation itself but Sansom successfully delineates the role and character of each of the monks in the Scarnsea monastery as well as the class conflicts within the town, as the monks get pensions, the nobility gets land and the lay servants, after many years of duty and loyalty, get nothing.

D. Ross Lederman's The Return of the Whistler 1948

"The Whistler" was an excellent radio series by writer producer J. Donald Wilson that ran from 1943-1955 (several hundred of the shows survive) with a narrator who commented on the action.  Lederman's The Return of the Whistler was the last of eight B films that Columbia made with somewhat the same formula; the seven others starred Richard Dix, who retired and was replaced in this last film of the series by Michael Duane.  The film also was less ironic than the radio series or the earlier films, even having a happy ending, as Duane goes looking for his fiancée (Lenore Aubert)who disappears on their wedding night.  There's a private detective (Richard Lane) involved and a sinister family trying to steal Aubert's inheritance.  Lederman keeps the 62-minute film moving quickly and shows considerable skill at choreographing the numerous struggles and violent altercations.

William Cameron Menzies's Address Unknown 1944

Menzies was primarily an art director (Gone with the Wind, 1939) but directed a few good movies, often low-budget films for double bills.  Address Unknown is in beautiful black-and-white and portrays the political seduction of a German-born American art dealer (Paul Lukas) who goes to Germany on business and is caught up in the Nazi web when Hitler comes to power.  The daughter (K.T. Stevens) of his Jewish partner (Morris Carnovsky) comes with him, to start her acting career, leaving behind her betrothed, Lukas's son (Peter Van Eyck).  When Stevens appears on the Berlin stage she puts back into the play words that the Nazi censors had eliminated; she is denounced as a Jew and chased out of the theatre and shot to death on Lukas's doorstep after he slams the door on her. When Van Eyck hears of her death he sends nonsense letters to Lukas, ostensibly written by his father, which the Nazis think are illegal code and come to arrest and torture Lukas.

The plot and the time period of Address Unknown are a bit sketchy but the film is visually and emotionally effective.  The cinematographer is Rudolf Mate, who photographed Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Lubitsch's brilliant satire of Nazis To Be or Not to Be (1942) and later directed the great iilm noir D.O.A.(1949).  Mate and Menzies create a claustrophobic and increasingly darkening world that was closing in on Lukas and Germany..

Alice Guy-Blache

Turner Classic Movies recently ran a documentary:  Be Natural:  The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache, directed by Pamela Green.  It is a story, told rather frenetically, of one of the first female film directors, who started in France and moved with her husband to America, where she had her own studio in Fort Lee, N.J. and a banner hung up there for her actors: Be Natural.  Her directing career ran from 1896 to 1920, she lost her studio, Solax, because of her husband's bad investments and a world war, returned to France and never directed again, for a number of reasons, mainly the more rigorous male hierarchy that studios in both France and America had become.  She continued to fight for the credits she deserved (none of her films has a credited director) until her death in 1968 at the age of 94.

Pamela Green tracked down what she could of Guy-Blache's films (only 14% of silent films survive in their original format, another 11% survive in other formats of lesser quality) and Turner showed several of them in conjunction with Green's documentary.  the best of which was The Ocean Waif from 1916, a film with "the wind in the trees" considerably influenced by D. W. Griffith (who in not mentioned in Green's documentary and who may have been as influenced by Guy-Blache as she was by him), about a girl brutalized by her foster father and rescued by a writer living nearby.  It's a tragic melodrama with a wonderfully subtle performance by Doris Kenyon.  Guy-Blache was equally adept at comedy, as in Canned Harmony of 1911, where Billy Quirk plays a suitor of a girl whose father will only allow her to marry a musician so he dons a wig (one doesn't hear the term "long-hair music" to refer to classical music too much any more) and "plays" the violin to a recording (this is also a reference to the synchronized movies and records that Guy-Blanche experimented with at Pathe in France before she moved to America).

Jesse Hibbs's Rails into Laramie

Rails into Laramie, directed by Jesse Hibbs, best known for Audie Murphy films and later a prolific director of TV Westerns, is effectively workmanlike, with bursts of invention.  I especially liked that when a jury of corrupt male citizens refused to convict Dan Duryea of arranging a murder they were replaced by an all-female jury, women getting the right to vote in Wyoming in 1868.  This colorful Western about a corrupt railroad town being cleaned up by a one-man army stars John Payne, who made his way in the fifties from musicals and comedies to Westerns and film noir --I particularly like him in Phil Karlson's 99 River Street (1953) -- a similar path taken by Dick Powell and James Stewart, among others.  There is also a strong female character in Hibbs's film:  Mari Blanchard, business partner of Duryea, who knows how to exploit and manipulate and keeps Payne constantly wondering where her loyalties lie.  The excellent cast includes Charles Griffith as the marshal and Lee Van Cleef as Duryea's bodyguard and hired assassin.