At forty two, Audie Murphy looked considerably younger in this revenge tale of an outlaw crossing the Mexican border back into Arizona to avenge the murder of his newspaper editor brother. Jess Carlin's (Murphy) criminal past is never elaborated on in the story, so you have to take it on faith that he was a wanted man, at least in the town of Rimrock where most of the action takes place. Rimrock is run by town boss Luke Starr (Broderick Crawford), behind the murder of Roy Carlin, and making life difficult for younger brother.
There's a cool early scene in which Jess Carlin enters a saloon and one of the poker table chairs is empty. A man strumming a guitar sings a line of a song warning Jess not to sit in on the game, advice taken by the gunslinger. Right after that, Carlin guns down two bounty hunters, leaving the first one alive, a former friend who needed the bounty money for a sick wife. Murphy plays the scene with a conviction that he didn't need to kill his opponent once the dust settled, something you don't see very often in a Western.
You know, there wouldn't have even been a story here if one of Starr's henchmen had been a better shot with his rifle. From a fairly good vantage point, the outlaw missed and Jess Carlin escaped the ambush attempt to make his way to Rimrock. Now here's what bothered me about the story. The bad guys were willing to take out Carlin early on, but once he was in town at close range, even face to face at times, none of the henchmen ever made a play. They could have ganged up on Carlin at any point leaving Luke Starr unscathed, just the way they did with whiskey salesman Boyd Thompson (Gereard Tichy). But then I guess, the hero wouldn't have made it to the end of the picture.
A couple other observations - before he had to press the point with the Woodstock Hotel desk clerk, Jess was offered a room at three dollars a day with plenty of windows and a bed with springs. Can't you just see Best Western using that as a selling point in one of their ads today? And I really have to search my memory for what point in time it became OK to show a nude woman on screen in a theatrical film. Not a live actor, but that painting of a reclining woman with a breast exposed displayed over the bar of the Silver Ring Saloon seemed rather scandalous for a 1966 movie. They didn't show naked women at Woodstock until 1969.
There's a cool early scene in which Jess Carlin enters a saloon and one of the poker table chairs is empty. A man strumming a guitar sings a line of a song warning Jess not to sit in on the game, advice taken by the gunslinger. Right after that, Carlin guns down two bounty hunters, leaving the first one alive, a former friend who needed the bounty money for a sick wife. Murphy plays the scene with a conviction that he didn't need to kill his opponent once the dust settled, something you don't see very often in a Western.
You know, there wouldn't have even been a story here if one of Starr's henchmen had been a better shot with his rifle. From a fairly good vantage point, the outlaw missed and Jess Carlin escaped the ambush attempt to make his way to Rimrock. Now here's what bothered me about the story. The bad guys were willing to take out Carlin early on, but once he was in town at close range, even face to face at times, none of the henchmen ever made a play. They could have ganged up on Carlin at any point leaving Luke Starr unscathed, just the way they did with whiskey salesman Boyd Thompson (Gereard Tichy). But then I guess, the hero wouldn't have made it to the end of the picture.
A couple other observations - before he had to press the point with the Woodstock Hotel desk clerk, Jess was offered a room at three dollars a day with plenty of windows and a bed with springs. Can't you just see Best Western using that as a selling point in one of their ads today? And I really have to search my memory for what point in time it became OK to show a nude woman on screen in a theatrical film. Not a live actor, but that painting of a reclining woman with a breast exposed displayed over the bar of the Silver Ring Saloon seemed rather scandalous for a 1966 movie. They didn't show naked women at Woodstock until 1969.