Solid, well done western, with an elegiac, muted, deliberately paced feel, despite the tense plot.
A cowboy (Randolph Scott) 'buys back' a stolen white woman from the Comanche's. We quickly learn that other men are searching for her too – there's a reward of $5000 for her return. But Scott doesn't seem like a mercenary, unlike the three men he's forced into joining up with after an Native American ambush.
Claude Akins plays Scott's opposite. A man with no heart, for whom money is everything. He has two young sidekicks, both little more than kids, who seem to have fallen in with Akins mostly for having little other choices in life.
The film is always interesting, even if it feels pretty predictable about where it ends up. There are a couple of good, surprising twists however. This lacks the moral complexity of Boetticher's earlier 'Decision at Sundown', but it's better shot and acted
A cowboy (Randolph Scott) 'buys back' a stolen white woman from the Comanche's. We quickly learn that other men are searching for her too – there's a reward of $5000 for her return. But Scott doesn't seem like a mercenary, unlike the three men he's forced into joining up with after an Native American ambush.
Claude Akins plays Scott's opposite. A man with no heart, for whom money is everything. He has two young sidekicks, both little more than kids, who seem to have fallen in with Akins mostly for having little other choices in life.
The film is always interesting, even if it feels pretty predictable about where it ends up. There are a couple of good, surprising twists however. This lacks the moral complexity of Boetticher's earlier 'Decision at Sundown', but it's better shot and acted