A sort of modest High Noon imitation which shows how even a fairly routine western back then could have some interesting things on its mind. Fred MacMurray is the new marshal of a town, and the witness to the killing of the previous one during a bank robbery, which means he's front and center in terms of responsibility for the impending hanging of the kid who did it, a local boy gone bad (Robert Vaughan). His High Noon moment comes when the whole town starts to get a liberal conscience about the kid's lack of proper upbringing, and starts to want to let him go, while only MacMurray stands up for hardcore law and order values.
If the politics of the film are as anachronistic as the tidiness of the supposed western town (which feels like a soporific 50s sitcom suburb as much as it does anything on the prairie), the clash of 50s juvenile delinquent-movie progressive attitudes and a Dirty Harry/Reaganesque law and order type is strikingly ahead of its time. Or maybe, like High Noon, it's making a blacklist/McCarthyism parallel, except here it's justifying following the law (ie, naming names) to a T even when it makes you unpopular with those who would cut the bad guys some slack. Anyway, Nathan Juran is no poetic western stylist, and Fred MacMurray is stalwart but not as intensely compelling as, say, Randolph Scott, but it's an interesting little movie nonetheless.
If the politics of the film are as anachronistic as the tidiness of the supposed western town (which feels like a soporific 50s sitcom suburb as much as it does anything on the prairie), the clash of 50s juvenile delinquent-movie progressive attitudes and a Dirty Harry/Reaganesque law and order type is strikingly ahead of its time. Or maybe, like High Noon, it's making a blacklist/McCarthyism parallel, except here it's justifying following the law (ie, naming names) to a T even when it makes you unpopular with those who would cut the bad guys some slack. Anyway, Nathan Juran is no poetic western stylist, and Fred MacMurray is stalwart but not as intensely compelling as, say, Randolph Scott, but it's an interesting little movie nonetheless.