Ray Milland directed a film himself for the first time with this, and not a bad effort too. He had a rather up and down career as an actor and continued in the same vein as director.
Gunfighter Milland is lost and on foot in the desert, stumbles across a stagecoach with its occupants brutally murdered and as it transpired, robbed. He makes it to the nearest town, is shot at by a deputy sheriff who should really have stuck to driving trains, then witnesses and gets accused of a cold-blooded murder, goes on the run and holes up in a young lady's house whose sheriff father is quarantined with yellow fever. Should he stay or should he go? With Love potentially in the air you know the answer to that. So, now with plenty of time for moralistic asides and romance he tries lamely to clear his name. It's sound and simple fare expertly done and an engrossing oater which also manages to lightly analyse duty (or dooty as Ward Bond might say), justice, hypocrisy and redemption. Poor old Raymond Burr got saddled once again with the deranged baddies part. The Gun is usually the final judge and jury in these kind of Westerns, however not so here - and it ends like a TV episode of Bonanza with the suddenly contented people rolling by like clouds.
Refreshingly any blurred lines that are introduced are not allowed; this film is straightforward in every department with all the generally accepted correct morality boxes ticked by the end and well worth watching because of that.
Gunfighter Milland is lost and on foot in the desert, stumbles across a stagecoach with its occupants brutally murdered and as it transpired, robbed. He makes it to the nearest town, is shot at by a deputy sheriff who should really have stuck to driving trains, then witnesses and gets accused of a cold-blooded murder, goes on the run and holes up in a young lady's house whose sheriff father is quarantined with yellow fever. Should he stay or should he go? With Love potentially in the air you know the answer to that. So, now with plenty of time for moralistic asides and romance he tries lamely to clear his name. It's sound and simple fare expertly done and an engrossing oater which also manages to lightly analyse duty (or dooty as Ward Bond might say), justice, hypocrisy and redemption. Poor old Raymond Burr got saddled once again with the deranged baddies part. The Gun is usually the final judge and jury in these kind of Westerns, however not so here - and it ends like a TV episode of Bonanza with the suddenly contented people rolling by like clouds.
Refreshingly any blurred lines that are introduced are not allowed; this film is straightforward in every department with all the generally accepted correct morality boxes ticked by the end and well worth watching because of that.