Ein schwedischer Walfänger ist auf Rache aus, als er herausfindet, dass ein gieriger Ölmann seinen Vater wegen ihres Landes ermordet hat.Ein schwedischer Walfänger ist auf Rache aus, als er herausfindet, dass ein gieriger Ölmann seinen Vater wegen ihres Landes ermordet hat.Ein schwedischer Walfänger ist auf Rache aus, als er herausfindet, dass ein gieriger Ölmann seinen Vater wegen ihres Landes ermordet hat.
- Pepe
- (as Eugene Martin)
- Crale
- (as Ned Young)
- Townsman
- (Nicht genannt)
- Townsman
- (Nicht genannt)
- The Minister
- (Nicht genannt)
- Townsman
- (Nicht genannt)
- Townswoman
- (Nicht genannt)
- Weed
- (Nicht genannt)
- Townsman
- (Nicht genannt)
- Townsman
- (Nicht genannt)
- Townsman in Church
- (Nicht genannt)
- Regie
- Drehbuch
- Ben Perry
- Dalton Trumbo(originally uncredited)
- Komplette Besetzung und alle Crew-Mitglieder
- Produktion, Einspielergebnisse & mehr bei IMDbPro
Handlung
WUSSTEST DU SCHON:
- WissenswertesThis was the final feature film for cult director Joseph H. Lewis. He would spend much of the next decade directing television episodes before retiring from the industry. His other work includes: Mein Name ist Julia Ross (1945), a terse little thriller about a case of mistaken identity, Gefährliche Leidenschaft (1950), a variation on the Bonnie and Clyde story told with gripping narrative skill, and the astonishing film noir thriller, Geheimring 99 (1955), which is as raw and edgy as any gangster thriller made that decade - all ingenious efforts that prove Lewis was one of the great low-budget stylists of his era.
- PatzerJohnny stands at his hotel room window looking down on Hansen who appears to be walking directly to the front of the hotel yet there's six shots of him striding down the street while Johnny takes his time going down to the bar and having a drink before going outside to find Hansen just approaching.
- Zitate
Brady: I don't think you've the guts right now to admit that this fellow McNeil had me burned down.
Deacon Matt Holmes: Oh, take it easy Brady.
Brady: Take it easy, Matt, what are you talking about take it easy? Didn't we agree to stick together? Well I stuck. Whose house got burned down? Mine! Whose barn went up in smoke? Mine! Whose livestock burned up? Mine!
- VerbindungenReferenced in Der Strafverteidiger: Tempest in a Texas Town (1967)
Like Mann, Lewis came to the Manichean world of the Western from film noir, a genre defined by its moral ambiguity. The opening sequence is the most astonishing of any Western (except THE WILD BUNCH, of course), and cleverly complicates everything that follows. It starts with the shoot-out, an innovative device, but one of the combatants carries a large pike. His opponent, face unseen, taunts him. The scene is highly charged, even if we don't know why.
The result of this sequence is cut, and we get the opening credits, featuring an elliptical series of scenes, some lyrically pastoral, others brutally violent, none making any narrative sense because we don't know the story yet. The film proper hurtles us into a violent arson attack. So in the first five minutes, the viewer is assaulted by sensation and violence. There are none of the reassuring signifiers of the traditional Western - noble music (the score here is as bizarre, inventive and parodic as any Morricone spaghetti); John Wayne or Henry Fonda above the title; contextually explanatory intertitles. We have no idea what is going on, we are left staggered, breathless, excited, reeling.
What follows is an explanation of these events. But the unforgettable effect lingers, and colours what seems to be a traditional Western story - big business trying to muscle in on small farmers. The most interesting figure is not the hero, Sterling Hayden, a gentle man forced by circumstance to find savage violence in himself (and saddled with a ridiculous, faltering Swedish accent, but little character), but the villain. In many ways he is the archetypal baddie - dressed in black, a gun for hire, snarling, brutal with women. But he is also a complex psychological portrait - a once great shot, now a cripple, lush and impotent. The familiar story is subverted to become the tragedy of an evil man. The film's surface detective element - who killed Hayden's father - is subsumed thematically by the investigation into this fascinating character (we know early on who killed him anyway).
Stylistically, Lewis turns the Western, traditionally about open spaces, new frontiers, hope, escape, into a bitter male melodrama about entrapment, failure and death. The stark, clear visuals are as beautiful and aesthetically exciting as THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, another morbid masterpiece. The disturbing editing, and exagerrated compositions seem to belong more to Nouvelle Vague deconstructions than a Hollywood Western. Almost as awesome as GUN CRAZY, this is provocative proof that Lewis was a great director.
- alice liddell
- 6. Sept. 1999
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Details
Box Office
- Budget
- 80.000 $ (geschätzt)
- Laufzeit1 Stunde 20 Minuten
- Farbe
- Seitenverhältnis
- 1.85 : 1