This brooding Western melodrama introduced Sigmund Freud to the wild frontier. Young Robert Mitchum, looking very much the leading man with his dimpled chin and enigmatic smile, plays a troubled, nightmare-plagued orphan raised from early childhood on the secluded ranch of a stern but loving widow. His sister loves him; his brother hates him; and his foster mother tries in vain to shield him from the dark secrets of his past, and from a one-armed gunman who will stop at nothing to see him dead. What sounds in outline like a pretentious hybrid of mismatched genres is packed with improbable (but entertaining) incident, and was photographed in menacing high-contrast black and white by ace cinematographer James Wong Howe.
