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The title evokes Ali Baba but the desert trembling under thunderous hooves is Arizona in the 1880s, O.K. Corral territory. "A high-ridin' woman with a whip," The Scarlet Empress in the prairie, Barbara Stanwyck in black leather astride a white stallion. Her delinquent brother (John Erickson) raises hell in Tombstone until the reformed gunslinger (Barry Sullivan) cuts him down to size, the courtship proceeds via six-shooter innuendo. "It might go off in your face." "I'll take a chance." The violence and kinkiness of a genre and a nation, grist to Samuel Fuller's delirious mill. Cinematic verve for days—the camera begins in a second story bedroom, reverse tracks out the door and cranes down to main street, tracks left to follow characters with dialogue and introduces the sheriff (Dean Jagger), gets to the telegraph office and is nearly trampled by the heroine's posse, four and a half unbroken minutes. Later the hero's brother (Gene Barry) playfully points his rifle at the ingenué (Eve Brent) and the steel barrel suddenly becomes the camera's iris, a gag lifted verbatim by Godard in À bout de souffle. "I never kissed a gunsmith before." "Any recoil?" (Truffaut helps himself to the shooting at the wedding for La Mariée était en noir.) A tornado amid tumbleweeds, the childhood shack where the doyenne and the desperado hide and contemplate destinies: "This is the last stop. The frontier is finished." Baths and ballads, collapsing dissolves and erect revolvers, the widescreen that seems to stretch on and on as a note passes hands at a sprawling dinner table. A grand opera from Fuller and Stanwyck, artists "born upset." Cinematography by Joseph Biroc. With Robert Dix, Jidge Carroll, Paul Dubov, Gerald Milton, Ziva Rodann, Hank Worden, Neyle Morrow, and Chuck Roberson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |