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Budd Boetticher enjoys a good haiku, his compression of form is evident in the preamble: The horseless figure enters the rainy night and sits down for coffee with a pair of strangers, one of whom throws his drink onto the bonfire and reaches for his gun, cut to two horses outside spooked by shots, fade out and fade in to morning and the man no longer on foot. "Nothing but a spot on his shirt where the badge used to hang," the former sheriff (Randolph Scott) in the Arizona wilderness, driven by vengeance and guilt. Help for the married pioneers stuck in the mud (Gail Russell and Walter Reed), tension with the rascally gunslinger he twice put away (Lee Marvin). "I'd hate to have to kill you." "I'd hate for you to try." Burt Kennedy's screenplay streamlines Rancho Notorious (dead wife in Wells Fargo holdup) and Shane (growing attraction between wanderer and wife), a terseness perfectly in tune with the technique. (The old-timer at the relay station is fully sketched with an empty bottle and a line or two: "Injuns don't bother with me. I ain't worth too awful much.") The maiden is fetchingly weary, her husband is "a little short of spine," they're all characters in the suggestive anecdote the cunning rotter spins during a thunderstorm—a splendid centerpiece capped with a note of graceful longing as Scott and Russell blow out the flames in their oil lanterns. The saloon is vacant but for an unfinished poker game and a dealer snoring with a shotgun on his lap, rounded boulders adorn the desert for the showdown between men who can't bring themselves to hate each other. "Sure is a shame, you and me having to face it out this way." A view from the departing wagon is concurrent with the famous The Searchers finale. Cinematography by William H. Clothier. With John Larch, Donald Barry, Fred Graham, John Beradino, John Phillips, Chuck Roberson, Stuart Whitman, and Fred Sherman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |