Alfred L. Werker's Rebel in Town 1956

 Another austere Western from director Werker, with a tightly-plotted script by Danny Arnold and black-and-white cinematography by Gordon Avil (who photographed King Vidor's Hallelujah in 1929 and Vidor's Billy the Kid in 1930 before turning to B movies and television).  It stars John Payne, who made an effective transition from song-and-dance man in the forties to Westerns and film noir in the fifties.

We start with a view of John and Nora Willoughby's (John Payne and Ruth Roman) small farm in Arizona with their son Petey (Bobby Clark), who idolizes his father for his Civil War record and dresses up in a uniform of his own.  Petey gets a cap pistol for his birthday and when he sees former Confederate soldiers in town he shoots his cap pistol at them and one of them, hearing the noise, turns around and shoots him.  Petey dies and John swears vengance.  The killer turns out to be part of the Mason family, Confederates burned out of their home in Alabama and wandering the West, robbing banks, headed by bible-quoting patriarch Bedloe Mason (J. Carrol Naish) and including his sons Gray (Ben Cooper), Wesley (John Smith), Frank (Ben Johnson) and Cain (Sterling Franck).

John Willoughby seeks revenge and goes looking for the Mason family and finds an injured Gray, who had started back to town to find out about Petey and is stabbed by Wesley, who had shot the boy.  John and Nora nurse Gray back to health until John finds out that Gray is part of the killer's family and brings him in to the sheriff in town, where a lynch mob gathers.  Bedloe and the rest of his family show up and Bedloe points out Wesley as the killer, who immediately flees.  John Willoughby chases Wesley and kills him, somewhat in self-defense, and reunites with Nora, who had known all along who Gray was.  Bedloe, saddened, says "what the sons of some men do to the sons of others is the tragedy of the world."

This stark moral tale shows how the wounds of the Civil War festered -- and still do even today -- after the conflict ended, with Willougby's and Mason's children continuing to suffer and director Werker showing the hatred and suffering of the children from both sides.