Cast:
Maureen O'Hara (Kit Tilden), Brian Keith (Yellowleg), Steve Cochran (Billy Keplinger), Chill Wills (Turk), Strother Martin (Parson), Will Wright (Doctor Acton), Jim O'Hara (Cal, General Store), Peter O'Crotty (Mayor of Hila City), and Billy Vaughan (Mead Tildon Jr) Directed by Sam Peckinpah (#590 - Ride the High Country, #591 - The Wild Bunch, #944 - Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and #1439 - Straw Dogs)
Review:
"It wasn’t the best deal in the world: I wanted to make a picture and this guy wanted to push me around. The script needed lots of work, but I’d get told to go back in my corner. Brian knew we were in trouble, so between us we tried to give the thing some dramatic sense. The result was that all of his scenes worked, while all of hers were dead. I found out about producers, all right."
Would you believe that this is the directorial debut of Sam Peckinpah? One might find themselves in for a bit of a surprise with how the film career of this esteemed director began, because it started in the realm that he was already quite familiar with: the western. In the sixty years that has followed the film's release, it is likely the least known of his fourteen directorial efforts for the man soon to be known as "Bloody Sam". One doesn't have to repeat themselves in describing the background of one of the most polarizing directors to come out of the Western landscape to just say that he was a man who lived on his own terms, hard but fierce in his vision that matched a Marine background and a childhood spent on the ranch. When asked what type of movies he liked, he once stated that the only movies he wanted to like are his own movies, one that detested every good filmmaker (of course, Peckinpah also stated that Ross Hunter was his idol because he matched the innocuous directors he didn't detest, so there's that). The Fresno native had drifted between film and television in minor but key roles before getting into the writing circuit in 1955 with Gunsmoke, the definitive television series of the Western that ran for 20 years. At any rate, Peckinpah wrote the gamut in the era of the Western television series (Have Gun - Will Travel, The Rifleman, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre, you get the idea), and he even submitted a script that would be cobbled together into One-Eyed Jacks (released the same year as this film and one that Peckinpah blamed Brando for messing it up). However, it all came to a head with a show that he would create with The Westerner in 1960, which came from an episode that Peckinpah had directed and written for the aforementioned Theatre show (essentially serving as a pilot). The show starred Brian Keith, who dabbled in television alongside character roles in film (interestingly, his most famous roles wound up being family affairs with The Parent Trap (1960) and Family Affair (1966-71)). He would direct six of the episodes while also writing for five of them. The series would last thirteen episodes (two months), killed due to bad ratings, but he received good notices for his efforts (when recommended for Ride the High Country, the producer watched the show and liked what he saw). At any rate, it was the good word that Keith put in for him that helped the 36-year old Peckinpah when it came time for the production of this film. Enter O'Hara. This was a family affair for O'Hara, since her brother Charles B. Fitzsimmons served as producer. He was the younger brother of O'Hara (who in that Hollywood tradition had gone another name) that dabbled in acting for a decade after having studied law and acting in the theatre in his native country before deciding to go into producing, with this being his debut. The source material used for the film was a novel called Yellowleg by A. S. Fleischman (he was born Avron Zalmon Fleischman before changing his name to Albert Sidney Fleischman), for which Flesichman adapted to the screen himself. He was familiar with Hollywood ever since his work Blood Alley (1955) was turned into a film, for which he wrote for. Technically this is an adaptation, as the novel had been written during pre-production, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in a few months.
The easiest thing to get out of the way is that this is widely available to watch because it is in the public domain, because the copyright notice was somehow not put onto the film. Making sure to find a good quality copy is always key, so imagine how that feels for a Western. The next thing to say is that this was one of the few films the director would make where he had no say in the writing (a process he was quoted later as hating) or final cut privilege. O'Hara, the last surviving actress of the cast, noted in her autobiography about the strange time she had with the director, calling him "one of the strangest and most objectionable people I had ever worked with." It certainly seems like the kind of unassuming kind of movie to think about briefly in the careers of its main stars and group, but one might find something worth diving into when it comes to a movie that is fairly solid in building a tense little thriller with a quartet not usually put together like this for the kind of film seen in its day. This is of course a film that involves a trip to bury a child in native territory that died because of a failed bank robbery. Peckinpah was quoted as loving outsiders, ones that are independent to the frontier, a sort of "weakness for losers on a grand scale", if you will. There are shades of that present within what you see from each of the four main actors to focus on, whether that means a man with quiet guilt and a ulterior motive, or a deserter with grand delusions, or a offbeat gunslinger, or a widow that is stubborn enough to persist through to the end goal. For a film that was basically a low-budget O'Hara + Keith vehicle, the latter seems to have a bit more to do when it comes to generating presence beyond something you might read in a short novel, but each do what they need to do as the main duo that spend quite a bit of time with each other. Wills was a regular character presence for numerous years, but it is interesting to see him with a adversarial role here, one that has odd designs for an army of his own to go with Freedonia, but he still seems like a good threat when paired with the showy Cochran (who made just three more movies before his life was cut short at the age of 48 in 1965), who makes for a worthy ooze presence. It doesn't play for any obvious clichés when it comes to adversaries (whether threats from internal strife or natives), so one shouldn't expect any sort of fantastical movements or rapid pacing. It takes its 93 minutes carefully for a look into the lives of flawed people in the West that Peckinpah would hone to greater results within his career. It may not be a great understated gem, but it certainly merits a look into what makes a director come into their own, if not at least before one goes on to see just what Sam Peckinpah could do when he had the freedom to tell the story he wanted to show.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
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