The Last Posse is a beautiful, elegiac film about the demise of morality and the rise of greed in the frontier West. Director Alfred Werker directed mostly B films but could soar -- as he did with The Last Posse -- with the right collaborators. The Last Posse is filmed in beautiful black-and-white by cinematographer Burnett Guffey and produced by Harry Joe Brown, who would later produce similarly austere Westerns with director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, often shot --as The Last Posse was -- in rugged Lone Pine, California.
The cast is headed by Broderick Crawford, playing a dipsomaniac sheriff, and Charles Bickford, as a ruthless and greedy cattle owner. Bickford is robbed by some ranchers he cheated and the posse chases them into the desert. The film has an unusual structure, with three different narrators taking up the story at different points, as the robbers and Bickford are killed and Crawford injured, and "the good citizens" who make up the posse divide up the stolen money. "A sheriff has no friends, just a job, " says Crawford, who survives until John Derek, who plays Bickord's adopted son, tells the whole story. The film takes place on the anniversary of Founder's Day in Roswell, New Mexico, a town carved out of the inhospitable desert and as soon as the founders, played by a marvelous collection of grizzled character actors, are outside their artificial civilization they resort to greed and power, with only the sheriff trying to extend civilization beyond the town limits.
No comments:
Post a Comment