Main Cast: Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Walter Reed, John Larch
Release Year: 1956
Country: US
Run Time: 78 minutes
Plot
Ben Stride (Randolph Scott, in a role originally slated for John Wayne) trudges stoically through the West, hunting down the seven men responsible for the murder of his wife in a Wells Fargo station holdup. As the film opens, we see him dispatching two of the miscreants during a driving rainstorm. Though the victims are deserving of their fate, the script is careful to detail the moral deterioration of Scott, who'd quit his sheriff's job to go on this unauthorized death hunt. Also turning up is Bill Master (Lee Marvin), not one of the bandits per se but actually a villain from Stride's past who happens upon the situation and sees a chance to make off with some loot. This film marked one of the few Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher collaborations not released by Columbia Pictures. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Leslie Thomas - Art Director, Carl Walker - Costume Designer, Rudy Harrington - Costume Designer, Edward Sebater - Costume Designer, Budd Boetticher - Director, Everett Sutherland - Editor, Henry Vars - Composer (Music Score), Henry Vars - Songwriter, By Dunham - Songwriter, William H. Clothier - Cinematographer, Andrew V. McLaglen - Producer, Robert E. Morrison - Producer, Burt Kennedy - Screen Story, Burt Kennedy - Screenwriter, Henry Vars - Screenwriter
Former sheriff Ben Stride, haunted by the killing of his wife in a robbery, vows revenge on the seven criminals responsible, who had escaped with a Wells Fargo lock box. Stride kills two of the men early on and then meets up with a couple traveling west. While riding with them, they meet another pair from the sheriff's old town also looking for the lock box. Stride begins to fall in love with the wife of the man he's traveling with, but it doesn't slow him from his task - killing the remaining men responsible for his wife's death.
Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema, praises director Boetticher's work: "Constructed partly as allegorical odysseys and partly as floating poker games in which every character took turns at bluffing about his hand or his draw until the final showdown, Boetticher's Westerns expressed a weary serenity and moral certitude that was contrary to the more neurotic approaches of other directors in this neglected genre of the cinema" [1]
