Roy Rowland's The Moonlighter 1953

The moonlighter is a cattle rustler who rustles by the light of the moon.  Fred MacMurray is in jail waiting to be hung when a lynch mob comes to get him and takes the wrong man while MacMurray escapes and watches the man being hanged.  After MacMurray takes revenge on the ranchers in the lynch mob he heads home and takes up bank robbing with Ward Bond and his own brother, who is planning to marry MacMurray's old sweetheart Barbara Stanwyck.  When MacMurray's brother is killed while helping to rob a bank where he had worked, Stanwyck is deputized to track down Bond and MacMurray, who have escaped in the only motorcar in town.  Stanwyck kills Bond and then Macmurray agrees to turn himself in if Stanwyck will wait for him (which could be a long, long time).

This summary does not begin to detail all the twists and turns in Niven Busch's dark screenplay (he also wrote Raoul Walsh's Pursued in 1949).  Unfortunately director Rowland is not up to the complexities of the script and directs rather flatly.  Even though the film was originally made in 3-D there are no effects specific to 3-D (such as objects hurled at the audience) in the current version available.  Cinematographer Bert Glennon, who worked often with John Ford, has a feeling for the shadows and subtleties of a Western landscape shot in black-and-white.  Throughout the 50's MacMurray tried to move from comedy to more rugged roles, just as James Stewart had (see my review of Nathan Juran's A Good Day for a Hanging 1959 on April 20,2016, a more successful attempt by MacMurray) but never had the right good directors (Anthony Mann, Alfred Hitchcock) that Stewart had and eventually MacMurray moved on to Disney movies and television, though not before making the exquisite There's Always Tomorrow in 1956, directed by Douglas Sirk, with Barbara Stanwyck.