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He heads back home from Kansas City, the young widower (Dale Robertson), from the start likened to migrating geese. The late wife is a memory cherished by his sons (Lonnie Thomas and Dennis Ross), Dad (Walter Brennan) is a former Texas Ranger and a rascally poacher. "We all get tangled up in the quick and the dead." The old farm has been overrun by cows from the neighboring ranch, which is owned by a former "peckerwood" (Richard Boone) who married the boss' daughter, and by the flirtatious heiress (Joanne Dru) who had a longtime crush on the returning feller. The fact that she's engaged to the town doctor (Robert Horton) complicates the potential romance, along with the protagonist's own laconic stubbornness. "Never saw a man run away so hard from what he wants." A most fulfilling Delmer Daves miniature, humble and deep, homey and cosmic. Not a Western, though one plays at the local theater, a hash-house waitress is asked if there's any shooting in it and she gives her highest recommendation: "Just about everybody gets killed." A lock of hair snagged in the dark of the screening room, a swirling figure on the dance floor, a partner for warbling "Don't Fence Me In" in a jeep—the perfect gal must still painfully compete with the afterimage of the hero's dearly beloved. The antagonist is not so much a villain as a climber vexed at being reminded of his roots, the whooping he takes is for not paying his laborer on time. The rhythm of life is also the rhythm of Brennan's scratchy mutterings, the codger waxes pantheistic in the woods and suddenly it's like Dovzhenko dropped by the Fox backlot. "Everything's alive and breathing. That's good." The other half of the double-bill is Renoir's The Southerner, surely. With Tom Tully, Helen Westcott, and Willis Bouchey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |