DIRECTOR: Andre De TothBitters, a small Wyoming town, is in the white-knuckled grip of paralysis.
WRITERS: Lee E. Wells, Philip Yordan
COUNTRY: U.S.
CAST: Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Tina Louise, David Nelson, Alan Marshal, Nehemiah Persoff, Elisha Cook Jr.
GENRE: "White" or "winter" western
MISCELLANY: bw; 92m; on DVD
Under a thick blanket of snow, characters' movements take on a dreamlike quality. They muster a few steps only to plunge face-first into drifts. They stumble aimlessly, agape at their frozen hands. They furiously whip their horses, only to lurch slowly into a blinding white abyss that quickly smooths over a trail of corpses.
Even before the storm, there is terror, isolation, suppression.
A band of renegade soldiers, on the run after robbing a bank, holds the town hostage. The movie's central tension: Most of the bandits are eager to get drunk and "borrow" the town's four women. The group's wounded captain locks up the liquor and women, yet as he slips closer to death, his grip on his men loosens.
He arranges a dance as a compromise when it looks like they might be snowbound. To a merry tune, the women ward off the hungry hands of their captors while being whirled violently in circles, until the film's hero, world-weary rancher Blaise Starrett steps in.
Before the gang's arrival, the town was far from united. The crisis only delayed Blaise's showdown with farmer Hal Crane. Robert Ryan, as Blaise, spits out a searing monologue early in the film that sums up the tension between newcomers like Hal, and tough old-timers like himself who made the town a safe place to put down roots.
"It took more than a big mouth to get rid of the lice who infested every bend of the road you ride so safely on," Blaise snarls. "... We hunted them down in the freezing cold while you sat back in the East hugging your pot-bellied stove.
"Nobody thanked us. Nobody paid us. We did it because we felt we belonged. We earned the right to belong. And all you've done is ride in here and put down your stinking boots.
"And now you tell us that you belong and we don't."
Burl Ives plays the captain, Jack Bruhn, an intriguing mix of honor and corruption. He tries to instill a code of conduct into the degenerate posse he leads and does so mostly by fear. If anyone doubted his ability to intimidate, stone sober he lets a horse doctor pry a bullet out of his chest.
Bruhn's fallen ideals find kinship in the town, where residents are struck by a malaise that mirrors the bandits' desperate dance of desire. Blaise seems the most likely to break out of it; just about any breakthrough in the plot is precipitated by him. Yet he is trapped, too.
Even the feud between Hal and Blaise is as halting as the slow-rolling bottle suspended by the siege.
Hal's wife, Helen, urges Blaise to cover the tracks of their affair, yet says she thinks her husband "understands." She keeps returning to Blaise's side to repeat unconvincing denials, then offers herself to him on the pretense of saving Hal's life, but her gesture seems self-serving.
The sense of being mired in moral uncertainty is heightened by the snowy landscape. Snow is used to such effect in several other so-called "white westerns" or "winter westerns," notably Sergio Corbucci's "The Great Silence" and William A. Wellman's "Track of the Cat."
One weakness is the film's overbearing score, which treads all over some scenes, leaving the viewer thankful when it lets up at other key moments.
— Becky
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