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"Just cowboy fun" leaves a casualty amid the depredations, carousers are followed back to their town by an unbending marshal (Burt Lancaster). (He arrives with a corpse by his side, the first of various links to Mann's The Tin Star.) "I'm gonna take these men back with me or kill them where they stand." The fellers involved work for the cattle baron (Lee J. Cobb) who has the land under his thumb, down to the dispirited sheriff (Robert Ryan). The twist is that the rancher is no tyrant but a grave man weary of violence, his minions are rowdy but by and large decent and hard-working, the bellicose foreman (Albert Salmi) is mostly guilty of being "all longhorn and no brains." By contrast, the merciless avenging angel clings to his duty as if filling a void, a leathery reminder that "lawman" is another word for "killer of men." The Old West viewed by Michael Winner is a craven hamlet encircled by parched dirt, where the camera makes sure to linger on buzzards and coyotes disputing over an equine carcass. (He aligns himself mainly with Joseph Wiseman's sardonic bordello owner, "not a great believer in the milk of human kindness.") The genre's sagging stalwarts opposite its avid neophytes, the twilight baggage of Lancaster and Ryan and Cobb alternating with early views of Robert Duvall and Richard Jordan. Sheree North's note of weathered rue, John McGiver with ear trumpet in the middle of a shootout, a laborious mise en scène of zooms and curving pans that nevertheless lends a sense of Thomas Hart Benton swirls. Main Street littered with corpses is the upshot of the ticking skull-clock, "comes with the job." Eastwood's revision in High Plains Drifter is around the corner. With J.D. Cannon, Ralph Waite, William C. Watson, John Beck, Walter Brooke, Robert Emhardt, Charles Tyner, and John Hillerman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |