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The war at home after the war abroad, inquiry is a barreling streamliner (in the opening it is filmed lengthwise to fill the CinemaScope rectangle, then head-on as the locomotive charges toward the camera). A dozen dilapidated buildings comprise the parched town, "a hangover from the old days, the Old West," the stranger (Spencer Tracy) is a one-armed vet who drops by and starts asking questions. "He's no salesman, that's for sure. Unless he's peddlin' dynamite." The dirty secret, involving anti-Japanese prejudice and murder by "patriotic drunks," is exhumed piecemeal over the course of one day and one night. The racist rancher (Robert Ryan) holds sway over a populace of laconic sadists and bullied collaborators. The sheriff (Dean Jagger) is a sot asleep in his own jail and the undertaker (Walter Brennan) is "consumed with apathy," the belle (Anne Francis) is a tough opportunist and the saloon has a pinball machine with war bond posters. "The rule of law has left here and the gorillas have taken over." The didactic prose at times sticks to the roof of the mouth, but John Sturges' visual construction is exhaustive. Clenched lateral sprawls slashed with ominous verticals, red gas pumps against cobalt skies and jagged rocks around the burned remains of a farm, Tracy's wry blockiness versus the elongated figures of Ryan and Lee Marvin. Jeep and roadster in the blasted desert, Ernest Borgnine's roiling menace ("half horse, half alligator"), the flower-strewn grave and the medal of rebirth. The avenging angel walks softly and carries a hidden karate chop, in the darkness he improvises a Molotov cocktail out of petrol, whiskey bottle and cravat. High Noon, but also the Mallarmé of Toast Funèbre, another vision of fallen comrades and "the memory of horizons." Cinematography by William C. Mellor. With John Ericson, Russell Collins, and Walter Sande.
--- Fernando F. Croce |