Reviews

Enjoyed/entertained. Perhaps setting is Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Sissy Spacek is immediately familiar, but I couldn't place/recognize the gifted 1960s composer-musician Kris Kristofferson until reading over the cast. I watched film twice as I was multi-tasking the first time. Film did not bore. I like the action, including the violence, the local folks-extras are realistic, and the plot is not predictable. It is an exciting ending. The sheriff made his pretty daughter a deputy, yet a truer male chauvinist than should be allowed. The villain/bad guy is a killer. He does have a clever if not somewhat charismatic personality, but really portrays a slime-ball.

Well, James Mason is smooth, handsome, and cultured with the classy accent from across the Atlantic pond. The synopses around these same websites do sort of spoil the story's suspense-fullness, but I'll try not to decapitate it too much. Wm Conrad was soon if not already Marshal Dillon in GUNSMOKE on the radio, as I'm of that vintage when childhood radio-listening was a pre-occupation. Dan Duryea is blah, bland, and bluh. Sorry, but I like that cruddy alliteration too much not to waste it out of context here, but Mr. Duryea at least has such an interesting surname. I recall brands and commercials from radio in the 1950s, but now back to film noire, a bleak French phrase that's over-utilized though you give us a more-better descriptive category. In Rock Hudson's brief role he sounds so d young. But no Doris Day, so it can't be the cornball if not pswaydo-sophisticate mid 1950s Rock Hudson technicolor movie. Read Bosley Crowther's hatchet/nasty review, because you'll see why he was one of a kind, before my time, and so now I realize why candid film critics are not invited to cocktail parties and funerals, unless it's the burial of an assassinated film critic.