Respected rancher and Civil War veteran John Garth (Sterling Hayden) goes on trial for killing his in-laws and wounding his wife Valerie (Anita Ekberg) but flashbacks from the witness stand give conflicting accounts of what happened...
Gerd Oswald's moody RASHOMON-like western doesn't explore the nature of truth the way Kurosawa's film does (in this case, someone's lying and someone isn't) but it's interesting to see how the same words and deeds can be used to bolster both the prosecution and the defense. In Garth's version, he's a long-suffering cuckold whose immigrant wife is a greedy slut with a yen for anything in pants while her testimony paints the war-hardened vet (who's job was getting information from enemy prisoners) as a sadistic psycho who's sole pleasure is making her life pure hell. There's also testimony from the town's Reverend (Ekberg's real-life husband, Anthony Steel) who's accused of being Valerie's latest paramour but in a rousing finale the real story comes out -and not a moment too soon, otherwise the townsfolk would have believed the wrong party. The film's been called a "noir western" but that has more to do with the adult themes than any Expressionistic, shadowy photography which would have been difficult in any event due to the sparse use of night scenes. The German émigré director painted it black in other ways and pushed the Production Code envelope by making it clear in Valerie's testimony that Garth raped his bartered bride on their wedding night, beat and belittled her for being a foreigner, accused her of adultery with both his brother and the Reverend, attempted to abort their unborn child, and tortured her with lit cigars. Whew. Prematurely weathered Sterling Hayden's dour demeanor doesn't give away the denouement (although his account does seem stilted) and as the titular enigma, Anita Ekberg looks gorgeous in period costumes but her overdone make-up makes the shapely Swedish somnambulist look like a modern day glamor girl, something the filmmakers no doubt intended as a come-on to entice audiences. That said, it's compelling trash with an ample amount of mayhem and well worth tracking down. Oswald & Ekberg reunited the following year for Columbia's SCREAMING MIMI, a lurid, gritty little B-noir psycho-thriller that predicted the Italian giallo cycle of the 1960s.
Gerd Oswald's moody RASHOMON-like western doesn't explore the nature of truth the way Kurosawa's film does (in this case, someone's lying and someone isn't) but it's interesting to see how the same words and deeds can be used to bolster both the prosecution and the defense. In Garth's version, he's a long-suffering cuckold whose immigrant wife is a greedy slut with a yen for anything in pants while her testimony paints the war-hardened vet (who's job was getting information from enemy prisoners) as a sadistic psycho who's sole pleasure is making her life pure hell. There's also testimony from the town's Reverend (Ekberg's real-life husband, Anthony Steel) who's accused of being Valerie's latest paramour but in a rousing finale the real story comes out -and not a moment too soon, otherwise the townsfolk would have believed the wrong party. The film's been called a "noir western" but that has more to do with the adult themes than any Expressionistic, shadowy photography which would have been difficult in any event due to the sparse use of night scenes. The German émigré director painted it black in other ways and pushed the Production Code envelope by making it clear in Valerie's testimony that Garth raped his bartered bride on their wedding night, beat and belittled her for being a foreigner, accused her of adultery with both his brother and the Reverend, attempted to abort their unborn child, and tortured her with lit cigars. Whew. Prematurely weathered Sterling Hayden's dour demeanor doesn't give away the denouement (although his account does seem stilted) and as the titular enigma, Anita Ekberg looks gorgeous in period costumes but her overdone make-up makes the shapely Swedish somnambulist look like a modern day glamor girl, something the filmmakers no doubt intended as a come-on to entice audiences. That said, it's compelling trash with an ample amount of mayhem and well worth tracking down. Oswald & Ekberg reunited the following year for Columbia's SCREAMING MIMI, a lurid, gritty little B-noir psycho-thriller that predicted the Italian giallo cycle of the 1960s.