For a western, this film couldn't be more original. Well-to-do emigrants from Vienna settle in the west to make a new beginning in life. We never learn what they left in Vienna or anything about their background, but they are well off, and with their European continental education they feel obliged to have their daughter married well including a generous dowry - $15,000, which is a vast sum in the Wild West. Their great mistake is that they have no idea of what America and its western mentality is about.
Anita Ekberg is the beautiful daughter, and her parents accept her first suitor, who is Sterling Hayden, without knowing anything about him except that he has vast riches and lands. So he appears as the perfect match for their daughter.
The film opens up by Sterling Hayden making a visit and gunning down three people, one of them being his wife. Not until late in the film we learn who the other two victims are. Anita Ekberg survives, which was not according to Sterling Hayden's plan.
The case is that he was a major in the civil war and branded and damaged for life by his experiences of the inhumanities, atrocities and brutalities of a civil war. Of course, neither Anita Ekberg nor her parents have any idea of this until it becomes too late.
She has two friends, though, who gradually get initiated in the difficult situation she has found herself stranded in, one of them is Sterling Hayden's younger brother, who knows everything too well, and the other is Anthony Steel, a reverend who comes to town in time for the final act and reluctantly gets involved in a hopeless case history.
The acting is excellent throughout, Sterling Hayden's acting is among his best, you have never seen Anita Ekberg exposed and vulnerable like this, and Anthony Steel is the gentleman of the play. Peter Walker plays the brother, who has been more or less muzzled all his life, with admirable restraint, but grows the stronger character for the necessity of always having been put down.
In brief, it's one of the best psychological thrillers ever made for a western.
Anita Ekberg is the beautiful daughter, and her parents accept her first suitor, who is Sterling Hayden, without knowing anything about him except that he has vast riches and lands. So he appears as the perfect match for their daughter.
The film opens up by Sterling Hayden making a visit and gunning down three people, one of them being his wife. Not until late in the film we learn who the other two victims are. Anita Ekberg survives, which was not according to Sterling Hayden's plan.
The case is that he was a major in the civil war and branded and damaged for life by his experiences of the inhumanities, atrocities and brutalities of a civil war. Of course, neither Anita Ekberg nor her parents have any idea of this until it becomes too late.
She has two friends, though, who gradually get initiated in the difficult situation she has found herself stranded in, one of them is Sterling Hayden's younger brother, who knows everything too well, and the other is Anthony Steel, a reverend who comes to town in time for the final act and reluctantly gets involved in a hopeless case history.
The acting is excellent throughout, Sterling Hayden's acting is among his best, you have never seen Anita Ekberg exposed and vulnerable like this, and Anthony Steel is the gentleman of the play. Peter Walker plays the brother, who has been more or less muzzled all his life, with admirable restraint, but grows the stronger character for the necessity of always having been put down.
In brief, it's one of the best psychological thrillers ever made for a western.