This is a 1974 made for TV film, a good old fashion western.Devlin (Steve Forrest) is a free thinking gun slinger who escapes the hangman's noose like Lazarus...sort of. He goes on to help the poor widow Gault (Sharon Acker) save her silver mine. That's about it. No twists. Cameron Mitchell plays the bad guy. "Slicker than bear grease." Available on a 70's 50 film pack.

Bland, predictable made-for-TV western has Steve Forrest as a feared gunfighter convicted of a murder and sentenced to hang, but who manages to survive the hanging and is set free. By-the-numbers script holds no surprises and the characterizations are all cardboard, including Forrest's one-note portrayal of a killer given a second chance. Bad-guy Cameron Mitchell chews the scenery, pretty Sharon Acker is earnest as a widow who owns a silver mine that "silver king" Mitchell wants to get and Will Geer is somewhat enjoyable as a crusty old-timer called "Nameless" who's Acker's hired hand. It's not long before you can predict exactly what's going to happen, what the bad guy's going to do, what the good guy's going to do and how things will be neatly wrapped up at the end. The whole production looks rushed and cheesy, the equivalent of a Monogram western of the '40s--and, like those Monogram westerns, it's a harmless time-waster. You could do worse, but you could also do much, much better.

I've been watching movies for many many years and seen some of the best , along w/ some of the worse. The Hanged Man is not the best But its not bad either. Steve Forrest's acting adds to the plot w/ a dimension of calm cold bloodiness that was prevalent back then. Cameron Mitchell seemed to be a little hammy but from reading history a lot of the big cattle ranchers/mine owners acted that way they thought they were above the Law. Overall it was a little above ave. There's a few other well known actors in it Will Geer Rafael Campos. It does encourage you to see other movies especially w/ those guys. If I may in a personnel note, its a shame us movie goers see actors faces that we have seen before but we don't know there names. A lot of them deserved more..

If you have the opportunity to pick this one up for a buck like I did, it won't be the worst dollar you ever spent. Not only that, but it was packaged on a DVD along with "The Gun and The Cross" starring Marjoe Gortner, so in a two for one deal, it stacked up for an entertaining afternoon.One curious thing though, the DVD sleeve described Steve Forrest's character James Devlin as having the power to read minds after surviving a lynch mob hanging. I was paying attention, but never really came up with that conclusion. In fact, the one supernatural reference had to do with a tarot card depicting the 'hanged man', signifying one who changes his way of life by surrendering to a higher being. This Devlin does after surviving the gallows, playing out the remainder of the film as Jack Palance, wasn't that an uncanny resemblance? I kept thinking Curly Washburn from "City Slickers". The other unintentionally distracting element for me was the name of the town where the story takes place called Goshen. That's a small town in New York not far from where I live, and I had to picture it being further out West.Something I never thought about, and maybe it was made up for the picture, but up until the point Devlin is declared legally dead, there's some discussion about whether he might have to hang again. At one point it was mentioned that the steps up to the hangman's noose numbered thirteen, unlucky in itself, but with added symbolism regarding a death sentence.Along with Forrest, you have decent support from Dean Jagger, Will Geer, and Devlin's nemesis Halleck, portrayed by Cameron Mitchell. Probably unintentional, the movie's fiery finale envelops Devlin in an eerie glow hinting at some Ghost Rider imagery, a comic book character that started out as a Western. You can pretty much see the ending coming from a mile off, and in that respect, you'd have more of a mind reading ability than Devlin. Still, it's not the worst Western you'll come across, and along with it's DVD counterpart, makes for a couple of hours of satisfying Western diversion.