When Western movies are rated, typically films like these get mentioned - The Naked Spur, Stagecoach, The Searchers. To my mind, there are only three truly great Western films - "Hombre" (based on an Elmore Leonard novel, and in some respects, too universal in its themes to really be regarded within the narrow confines of a Western), "The Wild Bunch" (Sam Peckinpah's historical classic), and this one, which, like Hombre, is not simply a Western.
Like Paul Newman and Martin Balsam in Hombre, and several of the actors in The Wild Bunch, I think that this may have been Burt Lancaster's finest moment. He epitomizes the hard, traditional, old-school, no-nonsense type of person that in modern times is represented by our veterans from the World Wars and Korea and Vietnam - impatient with self-indulgence, attached to old world values, dedicated to personal honor. Yet like those people he despises, he's subject to the same personal flaws. Despite the scorn heaped upon the attempted "back-shooter", in the end his own despair leads him to be no better than a murdering back-shooter himself.
This is, in every way, a fine film. It avoids the standard stereotypes. The rancher, for instance, isn't the stereotypical land-grabbing baron, but a person similar in all respects to the Marshal himself.
A 10/10.
Like Paul Newman and Martin Balsam in Hombre, and several of the actors in The Wild Bunch, I think that this may have been Burt Lancaster's finest moment. He epitomizes the hard, traditional, old-school, no-nonsense type of person that in modern times is represented by our veterans from the World Wars and Korea and Vietnam - impatient with self-indulgence, attached to old world values, dedicated to personal honor. Yet like those people he despises, he's subject to the same personal flaws. Despite the scorn heaped upon the attempted "back-shooter", in the end his own despair leads him to be no better than a murdering back-shooter himself.
This is, in every way, a fine film. It avoids the standard stereotypes. The rancher, for instance, isn't the stereotypical land-grabbing baron, but a person similar in all respects to the Marshal himself.
A 10/10.