On the Missouri-Arkansas border, a town has proclaimed neutrality in the Civil War. Under the rule of Mayor Nina Varela, they can get away with it, because she owns the lead mine and, as the opening narrator tells us us cheerfully, they hang anyone who violates it.... with a lynching going on as we begin.
Into this mix comes Joan Leslie, looking for her brother, Reed Hadley. He's immediately shot by John Lund, leaving Miss Leslie with a money-making saloon and lots of debts. Adding to this mess, come Quantrill's Raiders, led by Brian Donlevy, who's married to Audrey Totter, who was going to marry Hadley until Donlevy carried her away; now she's mean, and gunning for Miss Leslie, who's in love with Lund, because this is one of director Allan Dwan's movies, where symbolism carries the freight, and the dark/light twins at the center of this conflict are Miss Totter and Miss Leslie.
Miss Totter has a heck of a time, sauntering around in leather trousers with a sneer on her face, Brian Donlevy constantly putting her down. Miss Leslie is the good girl, unable to get a job as a schoolmarm, who turns readily to being, as she puts it, "a honky-tonk queen." The women running the town talk slightingly of men in a way that sounds photo-feminist, but with Union troops to the north and Southern troops to the south, and all the men in town the dregs of society -- who drink a lot but are very respectful of the women -- it's an uneasy equilibrium, a stasis that will last until the end of the War, Can Miss Varela hang enough people who threaten the situation to last until then?
When people talk about the weird symbolic westerns of the 1950s, they usually talk about JOHNNY GUITAR. This one is even crazier, because the people in this movie think they're sane.
