For someone who became a star playing a villain, albeit a very sympathetic one, Alan Ladd hardly played any in his career. This is one of the few times he played a genuinely dark character – although like Raven in This Gun for Hire, he’s well motivated: a couple of tight-arsed townspeople help cause the death of his wife. They apologise, and give Ladd the job of deputy sheriff… but he bides his time for revenge. It’s a very convoluted revenge – even though he really should just shoot the two nasty people, he also decides to rob a bank, so he gets together a gang with the goal of killing them one he’s done.
It’s a real jolt to see Ladd shoot someone in cold blood after said person has apologised to Ladd for the umpteenth time. I think the Ladd of This Gun for Hire could have made it work – but this is pudgy, alcoholic, one foot in the grave Ladd. (He’s certainly no Randolph Scott or James Stewart, both of whom made a lot of revenge Westerns around this time.) It also doesn’t help that Ladd’s plan for revenge is so long-winded and takes forever. It’s a full on plan – creating a gang and then killing him. What a psycho – on page, though – it doesn’t come across on screen.
Another debit is the fact we don’t have a nice character to relate to – towards the end of the movie we’re supposed to like Don Murray but he’s spent the first hour being a boozy idiot and it’s a little too late. They shove all this romance between him and the girl in the last 15 minutes which is also too late.
(You know, thinking about it, Ladd should have played Murray’s role – a struggling alcoholic looking for redemption, I think he would have pulled it off. And Murray would have been more effective as the ruthless avenger.)
NB Trivia note – Aaron Spelling wrote the script. He met Ladd via his then-wife Carolyn Jones when she played Ladd’s wife in Man in the Net and worked on a TV pilot for Ladd’s company; he later wrote this and Guns of the Timberland for Ladd, but neither turned his career around.
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