André De Toth's odd western stars Robert Ryan as an angry gunslinger feuding with a local farmer and coveting the farmer's sexy wife. Before Ryan can have it out with the farmer, a band of outlaws hit town and a tense psychodrama ensues. While the acting is uniformly excellent, this film is so devoid of any style it's hard to imagine what De Toth was after. Ryan and Burl Ives (as the lead bad guy) are excellent and the snowy imagery (it's set in the mountains of Wyoming) is different, but the plot is anemic. With zero close-ups of any of the actors, it's tough to get too deeply invested in what happens to any of these characters. Tina Louise and David Nelson are in it too. The rousing music is by Alexander Courage.

It's the Wild West and there is a small valley town in the middle of a vast range of snowy mountains. Robert Ryan is the rancher who lives outside of town, a loner with no friends, and a past liaison with Tina Louise, now married to one of the townspeople. The townspeople either run the few shops or they're farmers. The farmers have been annoying Ryan, what with their staking out claims and stringing up barbed wire. Ryan rides into town to settle things with one of the more provocative squatters, calling him a "pig-bellied farmer." Now, if all this reminds you of "Shane," it ought to. "Shane" unquestionably provided the model for the first half hour of this movie. The name of Ryan's character is even Starett, pronounced "Start", as it is in "Shane." Then the "Shane" template is thrown out, the feud forgotten, as a half dozen raggedy ex-soldiers who are being pursued by the U. S. Cavalry for some miscreant act ride into town, collect all the guns, and take over. Well, as a kind of curtain call for the "Shane" plot, there is a brutal fist fight that pits Ryan against perennial villain Jack Lambert. As in "Shane," Ryan manages to deck Lambert but then is set upon by the rest of the gang.There follows almost an hour of the gang ruling the town. The men want booze and women, as men are wont to do, but their captain, Burl Ives, keeps them in check while he has his bullet wound tended to. There is also a young gang member who has never killed anyone and tries to be gentle with the townsmen and women folk.Burl Ives intends to kill everyone in town before leaving but Ryan saves them by agreeing to lead the gang to safety through the mountains. No point spelling it all out. You can probably guess most of the rest.The best thing about the movie is its location shooting in the Cascade Range of Oregon. A shame it was shot in black and white. Most of these inexpensive Westerns are shot in sunny California, in Corriganville or some other place set aside for just such enterprises. Usually one senses the caterer's table and the principals' trailers just off camera. But here the men and horses struggle through unblemished banks of snow. Probably it was a tough shoot.Ryan does his usual professional job. He was a strange actor. His features, depending on how they were used, could be menacing or not, and his dry voice could be full of evil or sympathetic. In "On Dangerous Ground" he displays his ability to play on both ends of the spectrum, and in "The Professionals" he's the tender-minded horse wrangler. Burl Ives was evidently a nice guy but I always found him slightly embarrassing on screen. The man always seemed to show through the role. I always hear "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" in the back of my mind.The director, Andre de Toth, was a workmanlike mediocrity with one or two of the more memorable noirs to his credit. Wardrobe, Make Up, and Set Dressing are perfunctory. The indoor sets do not look lived in. The clutter of everyday living is absent. Nobody even bothered to fill up the shelves of the saloon with bottles. And the ladies' hair styles don't even nod towards the period.Ryan's character's name is Blaise Star. We never see it in print during the story and I kept thinking it must be "Blaze." I wonder if the writers would have called him "Blaise" if they'd been thinking of Blaise Pascal, philosopher, theologian, co-inventor of the calculus. They'd have shied away in fright. It would be worse than calling him "Chester" or "Montmorency" or "Governeur." You know, I checked all this out. There was never a cowboy in history named Wade, Cole, Matt, or Clay. They all had names like "Isaac" and "Zealous" and "Ulysses." If I were you, I'd watch this if there were nothing else on. There were times when I had to prop my eyelids open with toothpicks.

Day Of The Outlaw casts Robert Ryan as a tough westerner who resents the homesteaders like Alan Marshal fencing off the open range. But in Marshal's case, he's got other resents going as well since he's married to Tina Louise who once had a fling with him. He has every intention of doing something about it legally or illegally and who's to question in this remote rugged high country in a town that's barely twenty or so people.But when Burl Ives and a murderous pack of outlaws ride into town and take it over to provision up because the US Cavalry is chasing them, Ryan, Marshal, Louise and everyone else is in the same boat. Imagine if you will Ives's Rufus Hannessy from The Big Country leading a gang of outlaws and you see what the town is up against. The only one not a killer is young David Nelson of the group.Ives has an additional problem, a bullet in his chest and the only doctor around is a veterinarian, Dabbs Greer. He gets the bullet out, but Ives would need proper medical care in a hospital to recover and to guard against internal bleeding. That's what slowly killing him, despite the morphine Greer is loading him up with.That part of the story is absolutely the true. Around this same period President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo and was thought to be recovering at first. But even he did not get adequate medical care and took a turn for the worse and a week later, died. Andre DeToth who did many good and rugged westerns did this grim tale set in the west during the winter. It looks like good skiing country, but this ain't no winter paradise for anyone concerned.

Wow Wow Wow!!! OK here is another Western that has dropped off the radar screen that is not only a very good Western but it is the source of quotes that show up in Corbucci's "The Great Silence", in "Firecreek" and it in a way it also references "Shane".I'll give a quick synopsis: Directed by Andre' de Toth it stars Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, and Tina Louise (yes that Tina Louise "The Movie Star" from Gilligan's Island). Anyway it begins with rancher Starrett (Ryan) & his foreman Dan (Persoff) bucking their horses through heavy snow as the titles roll across the screen. They stop outside of a small town at a wagon filled with rolls of barbed wire. Ryan is going to have a confrontation with farmer Hal Crane who has fenced off some choice land for a farmstead. Ryan is also in love with Crane's wife (Louise). After a period of time where we learn of all these various triangles the confrontation comes at the only saloon in town. Starrett faces off against Crane and three other farmers. Dan the foreman is drunk but Starrett tells him to roll an empty booze bottle down the bar and to draw when it falls off.Up to this point this film seems like a typical Western and you think you know where its going.Before the bottle reaches the end of the bar in through the saloon door bursts a deranged Bruhn (Ives) dressed as a Union Officer with great coat, hat, and belts, along with his crazed gang of loonies with guns drawn who have just made it through a mountain pass after robbing 18,000 dollars. The gang gathers all the townsfolk together as hostages. The gang want whiskey and women but Bruhn has taken a bullet in the chest, and he tells them no whiskey or women, until he gets that bullet out. The only Doc in the town is a vet and he digs out the bullet and gives Bruhn a large shot of morphine, but it makes Bruhn feel better temporarily though the Doc believes the shot is fatal.Starrett tells Bruhn that he knows another pass over the mountain to Cheyenne and gets them to leave the town, the next sequences are reminiscent of both the desert in GBU and the horses struggling through the snows in TGS. I won't tell anymore.Ryan is great in this, Ives is great (better than his Western turn in "The Big Country"), and Louise is good.It also stars David Nelson (Ricky's brother) as the kid in the gang.All in all this is coming out on DVD and I'll be picking it up for my collection. So now we have an interesting progression from The Ox Bow Incident, Day Of The Outlaw, The Great Silence, McCabe & Mrs Miller, Joe Kidd, to Keoma.