Ray Milland's first directing effort was an iconic and intelligent Western. Its title could have been used by many of the great directors of Westerns from whom Milland learned: Hawks, Ford, Anthony Mann, Boetticher, etc. And the theme of an innocent man accused of murder was something Milland learned from Hitchcock, for whom he worked in both film and television; the sense of fatalism was perhaps learned from Fritz Lang, for whom he also worked. Milland plays a gunfighter lost in the desert and when he finally gets to a town he is accused of murdering the passengers on a stagecoach, a job actually done by Lee Van Cleef on orders from crooked banker Raymond Burr. Milland hides out in the cellar of a house where the sheriff (Ward Bond, from John Ford's stock company) is quarantined for yellow fever and nursed by his daughter (Mary Murphy).
A Man Alone was made for ailing Republic Pictures in their color process Trucolor, a process used effectively by Milland, with the help of veteran cinematographer Lionel Linden and art director Walter Keller, with its palette of mostly blue and brown. (John Ford, who made The Quiet Man for Republic in 1952, refused to use Trucolor for that film, possibly because it didn't accurately record green). The poignant music is by Victor Young and used movingly in private moments, as when Bond explains to Murphy how he had been corrupted by Burr in order to have enough money to raise her after her mother died and their ranch went bust.
Ward Bond recovers enough to help Milland escape but Milland comes back to town to rescue Bond from a lynching and to prove who was responsible for the stagecoach murders. Murphy and Milland are in love and decide to stay in the "rotten" town because, as Milland says, "Who knows if this town is any worse than the next one."
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