A watchable flick with decent performances by the leads and supporting cast, using some striking desert photography from Durango as background. Ford is a tired gunfighter who returns home to find his wife and two children kidnapped by Apaches. Kennedy is his rival who claims that she was just about to marry him.
The mismatched pair team up to retrieve Ford's family, but it's allmighty hard a-trackin' them through this here desert. Along the way they must pry information out of a handful of truculent witnesses, natural challenges, and assorted miscreants. The first group includes Dean Jagger as a filthy, mentally challenged desert dweller. The second set includes cholera and vultures. The third includes a group of self-styled renegade deserters from the Army.
Ford is forceful enough but burned out from the mayhem he's created in the past. Kennedy is by far the more ruthless of the two.
In the end they manage to reach the Apache camp and escape with the prisoners, but a cathartic showdown between Ford and Kennedy is unavoidable. Our sensibilities demand that Kennedy die. (I wonder why? Our ostensible hero, Glen Ford, the man we admire so much, wouldn't have demanded it, yet we in the audience wring our hands in expectation of seeing Kennedy shot full of holes.) At the climactic moment, Kennedy turns into not merely a brutal man but a conniving and cowardly murderer, which he has not been before, in order to justify his killing. It's an "evil gun," as the storekeeper comments, but it's a bullet from that gun that satisfies the viewers. Some might call it hypocrisy, since the ending violates the principles that the movie itself has been preaching all along, but I'd just put it in the "commercial interests" basket and let it go, just another movie that rejects violence except when doing so would lead to less pelf.
Sorry. Carried away there. Will someone help me down from this soap box? Thank you. Thank you very much.
Ford is his usual cool and savvy Westerner, wearing his usual small-brimmed hat, and is outfitted in earth colors suggestive of nature. Kennedy is always in a black hat and dirty shirt. Dean Jagger is absolutely FILTHY. I suppose there's no water in the desert, just plenty Alacron de Durango.
The Apaches are treated reasonably for a Western. They are human enough to retrieve their dead and hold funeral ceremonies. They may violate our laws by kidnapping -- kidnapping and adoption and such things were traditionally acceptable -- but they're neither treacherous no inherently evil. Not like that gun.
The mismatched pair team up to retrieve Ford's family, but it's allmighty hard a-trackin' them through this here desert. Along the way they must pry information out of a handful of truculent witnesses, natural challenges, and assorted miscreants. The first group includes Dean Jagger as a filthy, mentally challenged desert dweller. The second set includes cholera and vultures. The third includes a group of self-styled renegade deserters from the Army.
Ford is forceful enough but burned out from the mayhem he's created in the past. Kennedy is by far the more ruthless of the two.
In the end they manage to reach the Apache camp and escape with the prisoners, but a cathartic showdown between Ford and Kennedy is unavoidable. Our sensibilities demand that Kennedy die. (I wonder why? Our ostensible hero, Glen Ford, the man we admire so much, wouldn't have demanded it, yet we in the audience wring our hands in expectation of seeing Kennedy shot full of holes.) At the climactic moment, Kennedy turns into not merely a brutal man but a conniving and cowardly murderer, which he has not been before, in order to justify his killing. It's an "evil gun," as the storekeeper comments, but it's a bullet from that gun that satisfies the viewers. Some might call it hypocrisy, since the ending violates the principles that the movie itself has been preaching all along, but I'd just put it in the "commercial interests" basket and let it go, just another movie that rejects violence except when doing so would lead to less pelf.
Sorry. Carried away there. Will someone help me down from this soap box? Thank you. Thank you very much.
Ford is his usual cool and savvy Westerner, wearing his usual small-brimmed hat, and is outfitted in earth colors suggestive of nature. Kennedy is always in a black hat and dirty shirt. Dean Jagger is absolutely FILTHY. I suppose there's no water in the desert, just plenty Alacron de Durango.
The Apaches are treated reasonably for a Western. They are human enough to retrieve their dead and hold funeral ceremonies. They may violate our laws by kidnapping -- kidnapping and adoption and such things were traditionally acceptable -- but they're neither treacherous no inherently evil. Not like that gun.