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Director: John Sturges
Screenwriters: Millard Kaufman, Don McGuire / James Poe

By Roderick Heath

Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill are likely the two best films made by John Sturges, although neither constitutes his most famous work. Very similar as stories, enclosing near-identical structures and ideas, both hinge on a central image and situation – the classic American Western town as an island, an outpost in a vista of land from frame’s edge to edge. A railway runs through it, tethering it nominally to a wider nation, a civilisation, delivering emissaries from that wider world, but the moral stands that must be taken are purely local and personal. Both movies are basically Westerns, although one takes place in the period immediately after World War II. Both make something coherent, even philosophical out an essential contrast in their settings and their dramas – the illimitable vastness of the landscape, its beauty, its capacious and enfolding promise, clashes with the small, limited, enclosed world the people make for themselves, the buildings they throw up to house their ambitions proving cramped, claustrophobic, insinuating cradles of sick little stories. Bad Day At Black Rock is defined by a rarefied balance, filmed in then-cutting edge widescreen and blazing Technicolor whilst tackling a story defined by an almost subliminal sense of menace slowly ratcheting towards an eruption of violence. The second, whilst similar in many story and style points to the other, is an intricate situational thriller with a more baroque visual and emotional palette.

Sturges has long ironically suffered from having to his name two films, The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Great Escape (1963), so familiar and beloved they’re more like part of the pop cultural psychic furniture than movies. As a result Sturges has never been quite granted the level of cool attached to rivals on the 1950s genre film scene like Samuel Fuller, Budd Boetticher, or Anthony Mann, whose reputations often had to be revived and fought for. Granted, too, Sturges’ oeuvre is also uneven: at his best there were few filmmakers as good in Hollywood, and some of his work remains badly underappreciated, but at his least he often resorted to half-hearted slickness. Sturges began his Hollywood career as a film editor and began directing documentaries and training films for the US Army Air Force during World War II. Sturges had a particular penchant for stories about gutsy people who take particularly hard stands and often pay the price for it. He made his feature directing debut with The Man Who Dared (1946), a portrait of Anton Cermak, the Chicago mayor who took and died from a bullet meant for Franklin Roosevelt. Sturges made twenty films in the next seven years on the studio treadmill.

Many of Sturges’ early films, like Ida Lupino’s around the same time, occupy a blurred zone between character-driven drama and thriller. Others were low-budget but affecting and wistfully intelligent biopics about bygone heroes, The Magnificent Yankee (1950), a portrait of the renowned juror Oliver Wendell Holmes, and The Girl in White (1952), the story of New York’s first female hospital staff surgeon. Sturges continued alternating quieter dramas and flashy genre films for much of his career, and leaned toward a procedural brand of post-noir thriller with the likes of Mystery Street (1950) and Jeopardy (1953). Sturges finally demanded and gained A-list attention with Escape From Fort Bravo (1953), a portrayal of Union and Confederate soldiers obliged to work together when attacked by Native American warriors. Proving himself a lucid stylist and as well as a keen director of action, Sturges also confirmed his fascination with situations defined by extreme situations often involving characters suffering siege or locked in a standoff, usually with some rigid moral or existential principle involved. Sturges tackled this theme initially via dark character drama with The Sign of the Ram (1948), about a wheelchair-bound woman making her family’s life a living hell. Sturges soon recapitulated variations on this theme with Kind Lady (1951), about an elderly women trapped in her house with some unwelcome visitors, and Jeopardy, depicting woman’s attempts to save her trapped husband from drowning.

Stretching his legs as a major studio director, Sturges made a few glossy duds, particularly in the early 1960s when he tried to reorientate himself back to more quotidian subjects, like an adaptation of James Gould Cozzens’ regarded novel By Love Possessed (1961). But he also produced some terrific Westerns sustaining that concern with battle against the odds and uneasy entrapment, like The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). His film of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea (1958) is one of the few good adaptations of the author despite the limitations of trying to apply Hollywood style to a tale of crude authenticity, deftly matching the prose with epic imagery and readily subsuming the material into Sturges’ preoccupations. Much like David Lean, another former editor, if less ostentatiously, Sturges experimented with slow-burn structuring and a careful use of sound to create a slightly off-kilter variety of suspense, playing games with the tension between duration and severance, and whilst many of them were tepidly received upon release, some of Sturges’ later films like Ice Station Zebra (1968) and Marooned (1969) are marked by this, Marooned in particular, and it’s been rewarded by becoming a secret wellspring for realistic space movies like The Right Stuff (1983) and Gravity (2013): Alfonso Cuaron acknowledged the debt by featuring Marooned briefly in his Roma (2018).

The opening credits of Bad Day at Black Rock unfurl over footage of a high-powered ‘Streamliner’ train roaring along the railway tracks amidst the jagged mountains and sun-blasted plains of the California desert. The sleek form and thunderous motion of the train, amplified by Andre Previn’s dramatic scoring, mark it as the incarnation of modernity astride primal forms of earth and sky. Sturges immediately identifies and communicates a deep and fundamental tension within both the American landscape and the American project, one the narrative ahead will slowly tease out in a manner starkly at odds with the initial vision of nascent space-age force and confidence. Adjacent the railway line, a small, dark, festering melanoma on the sunburnt skin of the nation called Black Rock, a single street with some sun-weathered buildings, where the stopping of the Streamliner and the egress of a solitary passenger is a big enough event to pull townsfolk out to gawk: “Streamliner ain’t stopped here in four years,” comments the telegraph operator Hastings (Russell Collins). The moment is 1945, shortly after the end of World War II.

The fateful individual who alights, John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), strikes a strange figure in this locale, dressed in a dark suit that might as well as be astronaut gear in such environs, one arm permanently slotted in pocket. The hard stares and wary, boding postures of the onlookers swiftly begin to assume a definably sinister edge in having their afternoon interrupted: Macreedy finds himself being tracked by Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector David (Lee Marvin), and surveyed with less intimidating if no less loaded interest by the local veterinarian and funeral director, Doc Velie (Walter Brennan). Pete Wirth (John Ericson), the young desk clerk of the town’s hotel, its largest building, tries to fend off Macreedy’s attempts to take a room by telling him the rooms are all technically occupied, but Macreedy calmly ignores him and selects a room key from the well-stocked rack. Hector decides to see what kind of reaction he can provoke from Macreedy by going into his room and making like it’s his, but Macreedy seems quite scrupulously determined to avoid any kind of confrontation. Things become even more interesting when Macreedy mentions he’s looking for a locale in the vicinity called Adobe Flats, and the man who lives there, named Komoko.

Macreedy encounters Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), a man who seems to possess some mysterious gravity as a local feudal lord and rolls into town in his station wagon. Reno tells him that Komoko, as a Japanese-American, was rounded up and placed into an internment camp, and nobody currently knows where he is. Not dissuaded, Macreedy approaches Pete’s sister Liz (Anne Francis), who runs a gas station and repair garage and owns a jeep, seemingly the only vehicle in town apart from Reno’s station wagon. Macreedy hires the jeep for a trip out to Adobe Flats. There, he finds what was Komoko’s farm, the tiny house now a burnt-out ruin. A creepily creaking windmill spins in the breeze, straddling the mouth of a deep well. A strange thatch of wildflowers growing from a patch of ground nearby, a sight Macreedy later notes recalls many similar crops he saw during his wartime service, where flowers sprung from graves. The truth of what happened here in Black Rock quickly becomes as clear to Macreedy as the audience, all except the exact mechanics and supernal motives for it: Komoko was lynched at some point during the war by Black Rock locals, with Reno, Coley, and Hector likely involved. The local sheriff, Tim Horn (Dean Jagger), proves a badge attached to a dirty shirt and a much-abused liver, and he’s scarcely willing to get out of his own way, never mind help Macreedy as the visitor soon becomes justifiably convinced he won’t live to see the Streamliner come through the next morning.

The racing visions of the train under the opening credits give way to a particular awesome shot beholding Black Rock in its all its one-horse-town glory, a collection of about a dozen structures, something usually to be briefly glimpsed and forgotten from the windows of the train – the period equivalent of what is today often called a flyover state. Sturges returns to the same shot right at the end, but now with the train departing and the single street now filled with vehicles, offering an iconographic summary of Sturges’ reflection on the dark side of America, albeit one sweltering under the glare of the western sun. The running joke about the Streamliner stopping for the first time in four years proves a loaded one, four years being the interval between the outbreak of the war for the US and the murder of Komoko. As the story unfolds, Macreedy’s purpose in seeking out Komoko becomes clear. Macreedy served in the war alongside the dead farmer’s son, a “Nisei” soldier who was killed in the act of trying to save Macreedy’s life. The younger Komoko was posthumously awarded a medal for his gallantry and Macreedy comments, “I figured it was the least I could do to give him one day out of my life,” by delivering the medal to his father.

Bad Day At Black Rock’s origin was a short story by Howard Breslin, entitled “Bad Time at Honda,” published in 1947: the title was changed in part because it was too close to that of the John Wayne vehicle Hondo (1953). The story, in Macreedy’s motives for visiting the small town where a microcosmic battle for the soul of the nation unfolds, has distinct similarities to those explored in John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), in following a survivor of the war determined to honour the dead and drawn into battling social evil, and the situation similarly compressed in locale and drama. Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill are also likely movies that owe their making to the success of High Noon (1952), with its insta-myth vision of a lone hero standing up for justice against the indifference, often spilling over into outright disdain, of the community they nominally serve. But in Sturges’ diptych revised that template to more overtly encompass elements of social critique and relevance. Both films encompass prejudice as a theme, manifesting in Bad Day At Black Rock in the focus on an explicitly racist killing and its permutations for the community it occurs in. In Last Train From Gun Hill, it’s evinced in the opening rape and murder of an indigenous woman, and the confident belief of the men who commit it they can avoid consequences of the crime, only to learn lucklessly that she was married to a sheriff.

Bad Day At Black Rock’s story could very easily have loaned itself to a film noir-like visual approach, much as Mann had done with Border Incident (1949), shot in black-and-white with a looming, chiaroscuro intensity. Sturges instead embraced the possibilities of filming in widescreen colour, a visual format still very new at the time and intimidating to many directors. But Sturges immediately displayed his talent for exploiting that space. The cleanly graphic, almost comic book-like aesthetic he brought to The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape was certainly a significant reason for their popularity, but also represented a curtailed version of what Sturges was capable of when working at his highest pitch when utilising the space of the frame, which he exhibits in his use of space and subdivisions within it in both Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill. In Bad Day At Black Rock the visual patterns are almost strictly horizontal and linear, in large part because that’s the shape of the world Macreedy lands in. The locations are inseparable from character. Macreedy visiting the burned-out Komoko farm presents a blasted ruin that seems to reflect and mock Macreedy himself, who confesses later to wanting to remove himself from society entirely in his bitterness over his injury, the black and twisted frame of the house contrasted by the still-standing and creaking windmill much as the parts of himself Macreedy still shows to the world contrast his grave, dark suit. Black Rock was actually a specially built set, but the air of a Potemkin village to the place suits it perfectly, a perversely transplanted zone where it’s literally Reno’s way or the highway, or, rather, railway.

The dramatic crux of Bad Day At Black Rock doesn’t involve its hero but its villains, as Reno gathers all the local men, those subservient, in cahoots, or scared of him together for a council of war, which ironically for a confabulation called to pursue a malevolent conspiracy doesn’t unfold in a shadowy corner or back room, but out where Black Rock’s one street intersects with the railway line. There Sturges engages in a careful game of blocking his actors as framed against the backdrop of meagre buildings and spectacular scenery, with a fine feeling for the contrasting physical forms – Ryan and Marvin’s tall, slim, arrogant postures versus Borgnine’s squat strength and Brennan’s slump – whilst forcing them into a surreal dialogue with the world about them, the seared flanks of the mountains in the distance perpetually capped by pregnant cloud, a promise of fertility eternally out of reach for the desert locale these people subsist in. Meanwhile Reno expounds his firm opinion, one he then necessarily obligates everyone else to share, that Macreedy is a source of trouble that has to be dealt with swiftly. Macreedy’s lame arm, his inescapable badge of service, nonetheless provokes a constant assumption from the thugs of Black Rock that he can’t defend himself, and indeed provides a sort of psychological as well as physical pretext for ganging up on him. Reno comments: “I know those maimed guys. Their minds get twisted – they put on hairshirts and act like martyrs. All of them are do-gooders – freaks – troublemakers…This guy’s like carrier of smallpox.”

Reno’s power over the tiny nation he commands is built not simply on intimidation and entrapment through guilt, but a system of rhetoric that’s rather queasily familiar thanks to the past few years of right-wing American political expression – he even wears a red cap in his early scenes. In particular, Reno’s desire not just to lash out at strangers and foreigners as targets for his wrath, but his more purposeful, rhetorical efforts to define anyone who might stir things up by acknowledging problems and protesting injustice is motivated by some personal lack, some virulent difference and source of sickness, which they will then impose on everyone else under the guise of that protest. More immediately, Reno’s grip on the locale is explained subliminally: everyone knows he’s a dictatorial psychopath who will do anything to maintain his power, a knowledge that whilst unspoken dominates every judgement, until the very end, when one character significantly reveals self-deluding obliviousness to it. Even people who had no part in Komoko’s killing and aren’t exactly sure what transpired, like Velie, Horn, and Liz, have absorbed the truth and the reality of their situation, by emotional osmosis. It helps that Ryan inhabits the role with his finest pitch at the nexus of smug assurance and insinuating threat, investing casual lines, like noting to Liz, “Do you have a licence to hire cars? Might get in trouble,” with a veneer of reasonableness coating pointed warning and implied consequence.

Tracy by contrast seems, superficially at least, ill-fitting in the role, looking as he was every one of his fifty-five years by this point when his character’s supposed to be a recent combat veteran. Tracy himself seems to have shared that misgiving, having tried to pull out of the role early on. But to a certain extent this plays into his characterisation, Macreedy’s aura of reluctance, of weathered and life-battered experience, coincides with Tracy’s specific gift for playing angry righteous without succumbing to sanctimonious. The extended game of tensely maintained appearances and decorum between Macreedy and the townsfolk keeps threatening to break down when Reno’s underlings try to provoke confrontations, particularly Coley acting like the world’s oldest school bully, whilst Reno himself is happy enough to wait for dark and a perfectly contrived situation before he makes his move. When Macreedy travels out to Adobe Flats and surveys the ruins of Komoko’s farm, Coley follows him out in a car and on the way back runs him off the road, and when Macreedy returns to town is faced with Coley’s accusations of being “the world’s champion road hog.”

Those efforts build to a head when two decisions collide: Coley becomes determined to find a pretext to beat Macreedy up, whilst Macreedy, musing over his situation with Velie, decides a certain show of force might buy him a little more time. So when Macreedy goes into the town’s diner, run by Sam (Walter Sande), Coley starts employing school bully moves in claiming the stool Macreedy sits on. Macreedy continues to acquiesce until Coley manhandles him and grabs his lame arm, whereupon Macreedy hacks him in the throat with an expert judo chop, and quickly and easily reduces Coley to a shattered and bloodied heap on the ground. One of the great worm-turns moments in cinema, one that amongst other things might well have helped inspire a strand of wu xia cinema like The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) in the notion of a seemingly crippled man proving a still-effective fighting force, and at once honouring and taking apart the classic Western motif of a covertly tough but externally pacific man pushed to a show of manly violence. Even when allowing himself to goaded into a show of force and reacting with authentic anger to Coley’s thuggery, Macreedy remains judicious and intending a specific effect with his display, delivering a warning Reno, Hector, and the rest in the same non-verbal way they’re used to that he’s a dangerous force, whilst also being very much verbal as he uses the moment of shock to outright accuse Reno of Komoko’s murder and warn him, before the others, he’s doomed to pay the price because he involved feckless fools in his crime.

Both Bad Day At Black Rock and Last Train From Gun Hill are studies in misshapen machismo and its ugly impact on communities and individuals, but also trying to understand what makes such men who inflict it, and are inflicted with it, tick. This is explored more completely in the later film’s portrait of a father simultaneously indulging his son’s worst traits whilst trying to correct them, whilst in the former Reno’s sense of inadequacy, whilst likely endemic, was exacerbated by being rejected by the army owing to some physical lack, an incidental reveal that lends subtext to his comments about “maimed guys.” Reno tells Macreedy, as they talk at the gas pumps outside Liz’s repair shed, that he tried to volunteer immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, and makes clear he considered Komoko just another enemy to be killed in a local edition of the war. Velie however later tells Macreedy of another motive – Reno leased the Adobe Flats land to Komoko, thinking he’d pulled off a nifty swindle, but Komoko made the land potentially fertile by digging a well with relentless labour until he finally struck artesian water.

Velie delivers a wry monologue explaining the usual cycle of life in Black Rock, with biting overtones of a more general meditation on the American pursuit of riches, which he alone is perfectly positioned to profit from. When Macreedy calls himself a potential customer, Velie muses, “I get ‘em coming and going,” and explains the town remains a magnet for gold prospectors who come in, buy land from Velie as a notary, strike small deposits and finally wither away trying to make the illusion of imminent riches pay off, and finally finish up being planted in the ground in Velie’s coffins. Velie nonetheless proves the closest thing Macreedy has to an ally in the town, with Horn too soused and gutless to make a move against Reno, who even strips off his badge when he feels like it. Velie offers to provide Macreedy with transportation out of the town, which proves to be a most mordant vehicle, his ancient hearse. But the hearse won’t start, and Hector makes sure it can’t be repaired by ripping out a wad of wiring.

The tight, seamy, shadowy space of the hotel, Black Rock’s largest building, provides Macreedy with his only real refuge and space of freedom, continuing the ironic inversion of the meaning of space. There’s some curious echo and anticipation in this inversion, if only my mind, of David Lynch’s exploration of seemingly banal structures and the subsisting ecosystem of underground life that subsists in them in small towns as explored in Blue Velvet (1986), a reef where stranger life forms can flourish. Sturges would, meanwhile, repeat the motif in Last Train From Gun Hill, where the hotel the hero is besieged in again becomes his citadel, creating a distinct impression that views the trappings of civilisation not as an unwelcome intrusion into the nominal freedom of the open landscape but as a thankful flourish of sanctuary from it as well: freedom is too easily accompanied by barbarism. Finally Macreedy and Velie manage to convince Pete into staging a personal insurrection, in part thanks to Macreedy pointing out to Pete that now Reno knows he’ll have to bump off every witness to the lynching. “You haven’t forgotten and you’re ashamed,” Macreedy blasts Pete scornfully when the young man is prodded into confirming his involvement and claims it still weighs on his mind: “That’s really noble of you. I suppose four years from now you’ll be sitting around here telling people that you haven’t forgotten me either.” Pete and Velie stage a trap to lure in Hector and knock him out, and Macreedy ventures out of the hotel to where Pete has arranged for Liz to wait for him in her jeep and drive him across the desert.

So ideal is Bad Day At Black Rock as a narrative ideogram, setting, theme, character, and plot all entirely entwined, each aspect shaping the others, that it’s been relentlessly copied and imitated. Quentin Tarantino paid it characteristically impudent homage in Pulp Fiction (1994) in weaving a variation on Macreedy and the younger Komoko’s experience into Christopher Walken’s monologue at the start of “The Gold Watch” portion, albeit with a sardonic contrast between the source material’s confirmation of the nobility of wartime fraternity and the more typical racism expressed by Walken’s character befitting a different wartime sensibility. Bad Day At Black Rock is one of those relatively rare films with a sense of form as concerted as its driving ideas. It’s barely longer than the average B-movie of the time at 81 minutes, but executed with A-list production values. The stringent sensibility, made plain in the camerawork and acting, is further amplified by Sturges’ use of Previn’s scoring, which, after the pounding fanfare at the outset, is kept to a few, scattered, moody passages here and there, and entirely avoided in the few overt action interludes, including the concluding, inevitable fight for life at the end. That scene sees Liz delivering Macreedy to Komoko’s old farm on the pretext of fetching some water from the well for the drive, only for a spotlight to fall on the jeep and Reno’s rifle to start firing on it, sending Macreedy scurrying for cover behind the vehicle.

Liz’s act of loyalty to Reno is nonetheless pathetically rewarded when Reno makes plain he knows he has to kill her while he has the chance, intending to pass her and Macreedy’s deaths as a car accident, and her attempt to run is the ideal cue to gun her down with cold-blooded concision. Macreedy, thinking swiftly with every participle of his military training and initiative, grabs an empty liquor bottle from the refuse lying about the farm, and fills it with gasoline by unplucking the fuel line under the motor and turning the motor over to fill it, keeping behind the flimsy shelter all the while. Reno starts stalking down towards the jeep, only to be hit with Macreedy’s improvised Molotov cocktail, instantly transformed into a writhing pillar of fire and collapsing on the sand. Macreedy, not wanting him to die, kicks sand on him as he screams for help,and then loads his fried carcass into his own wagon for the drive back to Black Rock. A terrific climax that’s all the better for the way Sturges refuses to alter his style, maintaining the same quiet, music-free, detail-dependent storytelling as throughout. Macreedy’s ingenuity and means of gaining victory in a dire situation are entirely believable. The setting finally swaps the sunstruck vividness of the rest of the film for a more traditional battle on the fringe of the human world, in both a literal and liminal sense, with cycle of fate leading both killer and intended victim back to the scene of the mutually compelling crime, out in a zone of moral nullity. The setting, the stark pools of light and the Technicolor textures diffused amidst the shadows, is touched with menacing poetry, punctuated by the eruption of a column of fire, like some Biblical miracle of retribution yet doled out on a most painfully small and effective scale.

Macreedy delivers Reno to Horn and Velie at the Black Rock jail, and delivers the awful news about his sister to Pete. A brief coda sees Macreedy leaving on the Streamliner, with Black Rock now invaded by the long-feared forces of external authority and exposing its infamy, but also with a note of optimism as Macreedy hands over Komoko’s medal to Velie when the old man suggests, “Maybe we need it – maybe give us something to build on.” Bad Day At Black Rock was a solid success for MGM, and it cemented Sturges’s career. The success of The Gunfight At The O.K. Corral two years later led to Sturges reuniting with that film’s star Kirk Douglas and much the same crew for Last Train From Gun Hill, scripted by James Poe, one of Hollywood’s best writing talents of the period – he excelled at portraits of increasingly mad quarrels and trips to self-destruction, penning amongst other films Robert Aldrich’s Attack! (1955), James B. Harris’s The Bedford Incident (1965), and Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). Last Train From Gun Hill contrasts Bad Day At Black Rock as this time Sturges opens with immediate portrayal of the racially-slanted act of violence that propels the story. Douglas plays Matt Morgan, a United State Marshall based in the small town of Pawley. His Cherokee wife Catherine (Ziva Rodann) drives in a horse buggy back from a visit to her family at a nearby reservation along with their son Petey (Lars Henderson). Two men, Rick Belden (Earl Holliman) and Lee Smithers (Brian G. Hutton), whiling away the day boozing in the copse lining the road and in the mood for provocative fun, catch sight of the pretty, passing lady, and mount up to intercept the buggy and make harassing appeals for attention.

Catherine, wisely realising that the two men are liquored up and dangerous, lashes Rick in the face with her buggy whip and tries to make a dash for town, only to lose control and crash. Rick and Lee corner Catherine and Rick strips off her clothes, whilst Petey, ignored, steals Rick’s horse and rides to town to fetch his father. Matt dashes back to the crash, only to find his wife raped and dead. Matt immediately knows where he can turn for information about the attackers, when he sees the initials CB emblazoned in silver letters on the saddle of Petey’s stolen mount, the logo of his old friend Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn). Rick is Craig’s son, and he and Lee return to the Belden ranch outside the town of Gun Hill, spinning a yarn about how Rick borrowed his father’s saddle and horse for a jaunt only to have them stolen whilst they were in a saloon in Pawley. Matt catches a train to Gun Hill with Craig’s saddle and returns it to its owner: Craig is initially overjoyed to see his old pal, but Matt quickly realises, once Craig explains Rick and Lee’s report, that the two men are lying and likely committed the crime. Craig, despite realising his son is guilty, bristles at Matt’s threats to arrest Rick, demanding that he leave the locale, or else face his wrath.

The attack that opens the film is one of Sturges’ strongest units of cinema, setting up the ensuing drama and depicting the speed with which a perfectly ordinary day can become a grotesque calamity. Sturges’s intensifying visual flourishes include use of a toppled, twisted log to provide a sort of captioning frame for the buggy’s crash. The still-whirling wheel of the toppled buggy is a distorting lens through which Lee’s leering face is viewed. Mrs Morgan’s red blouse comes off in Rick’s hand and her desperate, near-naked form squirms in the earthy filth trying to maintain a shred of modesty whilst the two rapists advance. By contrast, Matt is regaling Pawley’s young ‘uns for the umpteenth time with an account of his most legendary exploit, defeating the outlaw Bradley brothers in a shootout, the woodwork of his office still bearing the bullet holes of the confrontation but the one-time life-and-death battle now just a tale for the young boys to ween their heroic fantasies on. Last Train From Gun Hill is then like Shane (1953) a Western film about the idea of the Western film and its popularity with the audience of the day, but one that also more aggressively pursues its essential meaning. After promising to deliver quick and decisive justice to Catherine’s father (Charles Stevens), Matt departs for Gun Hill by train. On the train he encounters Linda (Carolyn Jones), who is obliged by a lack of seats, including two taken up by the telltale saddle, to sit by Matt. Linda is taken by Matt’s manners and distracted air (“You can always tell the ones that are married.”) but who also warns him about the potential welcome he’ll find in Gun Hill because “I know who that saddle belongs to.”

Sturges, whilst vague about the location of the Pawley and Gun Hill which lie within a day’s journey by train apart, emphasises the way both towns have been claimed by the spread of American domain, no longer defined by the mythic danger and chaos and openness of the frontier. This notion is subtly reinforced by aspects of the design, like the emphasis on the highly Victorian décor of the Gun Hill hotel with its plush red wallpaper, but with just enough crudeness about the edges to hint these are still places where wildness lurks under the surface, and perhaps will for decades, even centuries. The trains roll right through the middle of the town, a piquant detail that also has a significant impact on how the story plays out. Matt’s heroic past is just that, and now he’s a married family man, his old stories now just tales for boys, although his town is still happy to have its lawman. Craig’s grip on Gun Hill has succumbed to an even more advanced, if still pre-modern paradigm, as he is the veritable feudal lord, with command over its economic wellbeing and all that flows from that: “I own the sheriff, I own this town, I own everything in it.” I wonder how many times Bob Dylan watched the film as a teenager.

Matt and Craig’s first, amiable conversation suggests they were both at one time on the wrong side of the law: “I finally figured out the other side didn’t pay,” Matt admits when Craig laughs about him being a Marshall. “Kill him slow, the Indian way,” Catherine’s father urges Matt when he sets out to track down the killers, to Matt’s riposte that “I’ll kill him – my own way,” meaning with legal process. This seems like Matt is upholding civilised virtues and deploring vigilante justice, but as he makes clear to Rick later, relishing explaining to him the long, agonising wait to hung and then the intimate horror of the execution itself, that the legal way might be even more elaborately sadistic and ruthless, and Matt suddenly seems a rather more maniacal and possibly unhinged figure than Craig, whose chief defence is that for all his faults has a single, honourable cause in protecting his son, no matter how much his son deserves punishment. Which is an interesting twist in the story given that Sturges makes Matt otherwise a paradigm, contrasting Matt’s capacity to be playful as he indulges the lads of Pawley, contrasts Craig’s more baleful attitude to being a father, enacted in excruciating manner when Rick and Lee return to the ranch.

When Rick says the whip cut on his cheek, delivered by Catherine’s lash, was done by a woman, Craig is vaguely proud of his son’s battle scars from amour, but a quip from one of Craig’s ranch hands, Beero (Brad Dexter), about fighting men from now on raises Craig’s ire and he compels Rick to fight Beero on the point of honour: “Somebody insults you, you hit ‘em – I don’t care if you win or lose but you fight, you understand?” he demands. Rick promptly loses as Beero bests him, yet another moment in what feels like an untold number of small humiliations for Rick in trying to live up to his father’s idea of manly uprightness. Quinn doesn’t play Craig as coldly imperial, finding elements of furtive pride and delight in his son’s misbehaviour even in his anger at a provocation like staking off with his saddle simmers, and a streak of pathos when he comprehends how wasted his efforts have been Craig’s personal space in the ranch house is a temple of macho display with cattle horns, buffalo heads, racks of rifles, and a collection of spurs. Craig himself wearily admits to Matt that he was left raising Rick after his wife died many years earlier: “You spend all your life working for something – all of a sudden the reason you wanted it is gone.”

The similarities between Reno Smith and Craig Belden as antagonists are telling: both wield dictatorial power over a small town. Both set out to foil the justice with an unswerving sense of their own prerogative and rightness. Craig is carefully defined as far less monstrous than Reno, and has to some extent a sympathetic motive in refusing to yield to Matt, but his blend of imperious machismo and weakness is ultimately just as destructive. Rick embodies Craig’s fear of inadequacy, whilst bringing his own, nasty entitlement to bear. Rick and Lee both dismiss their victim to Craig as “just an Indian squaw.” “’Round here we pay a bounty for killing an Indian,” a townsperson tells Matt. Craig’s more ambivalent position and reactions are suggestive, as Lee’s dismissal sparks his fury, ordering Lee to get off the ranch before he kills him, and Craig tells his son, “If I was Matt I wouldn’t serve that warrant, I’d just kill you.” Matt’s consuming pain of loss and rage meanwhile leave him as riven through as Macreedy’s arm and wartime experience, with Douglas expertly playing the scenes where Matt affects casual joviality with Craig, until the penny drops and he turns glaze-eyed fury on his old friend, and Craig’s response is riven through a note of panic as his paternal instinct reacts far more quickly and vehemently than his good sense or feeling for his old friend. Matt stalks out, ignoring Craig’s warnings, and after asking around the town about Rick’s whereabouts, acts on a tip from Linda, heading to Charlie’s Place, a saloon and whorehouse.

Sturges fits in a surprisingly racy gag as Matt sneaks into through an upstairs window in Charlie’s Place, disturbing a woman sleeping unclothed in her bed, evidently a prostitute taking some time out: “Can’t a girl get some sleep?” she groans as if men climb in her window all the time: “Sorry. Don’t make any noise.” Matt requests, to her sceptical expression. As if by some dark cosmic joke, he immediately gets a chance to snare Rick, who’s been playing cards with his friends but just come upstairs on the hunt for a woman. Rick hides behind a corner when he sees Matt sneak into the place, but when someone calls out to Rick from the saloon, Matt notices Rick’s boots under the curtain, and promptly knocks him out without a struggle. By this point Matt has already learned he can’t look for any allies in Gun Hill just as Craig promised, with the sheriff, Bartlett (Sande again), warning him off. His only friend proves to be Linda, who has been shacked up with Craig for a long time, but he never sought to marry her. On the train, Linda alludes to her own recent stay in hospital. Eventually it emerges that Craig beat her black and blue after Rick badmouthed her to him. This offers another significant hue to Craig’s dark influence on Rick and vice versa, whilst also setting up a fascinating subplot involving Linda’s evolving desire to punish Craig and help Matt whilst maintaining a lingering affection for Craig that finally registers at the end as tragic loss. Jones more or less steals the film with her marvellous performance, with an air of premature and hard-won worldly wisdom invested into her sense of gesture, wielding the angles of her body for expression of tedium with wastes of time and exhaustion with being surrounded by bores and brutes: Matt being gentlemanly enough to take off his hat when Linda sits next to him on the train is contrasted with Lee carelessly plonking his ass in a chair before she does.

Last Train From Gun Hill is more generic in aspects than Bad Day At Black Rock, with a more familiar approach to formal elements like Dimitri Tiomkin’s characteristic scoring and less time for playing with time and narrative burn. But it becomes something of a master class in utilising a compressed setting, with a scenario reminiscent of Delmer Daves’ 3:10 To Yuma (1957) as Matt, with Rick in his grasp, must find a way of taking his charge to the titular train after abandoning the relative if besieged security of his hotel room. Last Train From Gun Hill’s sense of enclosure subtly contrasts the sprawl and claustrophobic space of the earlier movie. The first scene, which immediately sets the story in motion with a quick turn from sojourning play to ugly violence, takes place along a trail running along a stream surrounded by trees that frame and enfold the scene of drama. The sweeping vistas around the Belden ranch retain the promise of the land as an unfettered domain where titanic men can roam, and yet these are quickly swapped for the baroque machismo of Craig’s ranch and the pretence of the hotel interior. There Matt turns the imposed limitations to his own advantage, including setting up mirrors to let him keep watch on his the corridor outside his room and shoving Rick against the window to be a human shield against stray bullets. In similar fashion, Sturges finds freedom in the confines of Charlie’s and the hotel, subdividing frames in frames with viewpoints through doorways and stairways, constructing contrasts in visual texture that recall a Matisse painting.

Sturges’ lucid contrast of the natural and human zones, and the tension between them manifesting in a clash between confinement and freedom, would continue to be a motif in his best work. Most obviously it’s explicated in The Great Escape with the literal demand of the POW camp inmates to escape to liberty as represented again by soaring mountains in the distance, in that case the Alps. Whilst The Magnificent Seven simplified Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) to a virtual comic book level in a dramatic sense, it depended nonetheless on Sturges’s ability to make the space of the Mexican village matter as an island of civilisation amidst a wild and dangerous world, and with the Kurosawa film’s theme of social caste transmuted, as in much of Sturges’s oeuvre, into concerns with race. The Old Man and the Sea similarly took up Hemingway’s parable in presenting its hero in combat with the primal elements, a place where ironically he’s far more ennobled, far more powerful, than ever he could be on land, but also constantly forced to relive the same essential tragedy of his existence. Even something like Ice Station Zebra, often painted as Sturges’s decline into prestige movie dross, hinges on a sense of the violent contrast between a submarine’s pressure-cooker interior, at once point violated by icy ocean, and the open wilderness of Arctic climes. Marooned would take the disparity to its ultimate limit.

Sturges gives Douglas a great moment when Matt first captures Rick to display his trademark physicality. Matt descends the stairs in Charlie’s Plac with Rick’s unconscious form draped over his shoulder, and kills the barman and a Belden goon and injures another when they try to draw on him. This display of prowess also makes more than clear when Craig retains a sense of awe and fear towards Matt, and adopts wise caution in dealing with him in the high-pressure situation that evolves. Craig, venturing up to visit Matt in his hotel room where he keeps Rick handcuffed to the bed, reminds his friend that he saved his life and owes him something, but when Craig hurls a fixture at Matt whilst Matt fires on Craig’s men out in the hall, Matt spins about and glowers at Craig: “I oughta kill you for that!” he barks, in that inimitable way of Douglas’s for playing virulent anger, but tells Craig that’s his debt paid and lets him leave. Meanwhile Linda, after getting the full story of how everything transpired from Lee, resolves to fulfil Matt’s request for her to get him a shotgun, which he needs to make an escape. Linda does so, which Craig learns about with wild despair and anger, just as Lee sets fire to the hotel to force Matt to flee it.

The incredible last ten minutes of the film see Matt making his escape as the hotel begins to crumble about his ears, flaming debris tumbling about his ears, shotgun jammed against Rick’s jaw and finger on the trigger. The two climb aboard a wagon and roll down towards the railway landing, and Matt contrives to let the arriving train divide him from Craig and the other, stalking enemies. But Lee intercepts them and tries to force Matt to release Rick: Lee fires and accidentally kills Rick instead whilst Matt blows Lee away. With deadpan acceptance, Matt unlocks himself from the handcuffs that kept him tethered to Rick, but Craig, finding his dead son, demands a shootout in reckoning with Matt. Matt warns him not to try, but Craig insists, and a few seconds later lies by his son, dying, murmuring an appeal to Matt to do a better job raising his son without a mother than he did. Matt departs, watching from the train as it rolls out slowly as Craig’s body is cradled by a dumbstruck Linda. Last Train From Gun Hill is in the final measure close to the platonic ideal of the 1950s “adult” western, fulfilling its basic genre function and its broader neo-mythic project whilst scratching away in search of the perversely and pathetically human under the masks of such templates. And taken with Bad Day At Black Rock, it completes an ironic matched set, a portrait of an evolving America that perhaps hasn’t evolved that far.