Product: Hangman's Knot (1952)
Rating: 4.0
A tense, well-made oater with Randolph Scott standing firm against Lee Marvin (on his side) and a murderous bunch of drifters
Major Matt Stewart, CSA, (Randolph Scott) and his men have a problem. It's Nevada, 1865, and they've just shot down a group of Union soldiers and taken $50,000 worth of gold. Their orders were do to just this, and to get the gold back to the Confederacy. The problem is that the war ended a few weeks ago and they didn't know it. No one will believe their story if they turn themselves in, not with ten or so Union corpses on the ground. They decide to keep the gold and attempt to make their way back home. This isn't going to be easy. Stewart and his men wind up in an isolated stage relay station, pinned down by a gang of murderous drifters. With Stewart and his men are Molly Hull (Donna Reed) and Lee Kemper (Richard Denning), who'd been passengers on a stage. Molly had been a Union nurse and is a fine looking woman. Kemper says he's her fiancée, but we suspect that he's just a smooth operator, probably with cowardly tendencies. And there's the couple who run the station, an old man and his daughter-in-law, a woman whose husband and son were killed fighting for the Union.Then there's the matter of Stewart's men. Most are reasonably good guys, including Cass Browne (Frank Faylen), a matter-of-fact realist with a sense of irony, and Jamie Groves (Claude Jarman, Jr.), the obligatory young kid who has to learn to become a man. There's also Rolph Bainter (Lee Marvin) as, what else if Marvin plays him, a mouth-breathing bully with a fondness for killing. "What's happened to you? Is it that easy to kill a man?" Major Stewart asks Bainter just after Bainter guns down a minor player. "Well, isn't it?" says Bainter with a shrug.Hangman's Knot starts with a rousing action sequence that includes the attack on the gold escort, the tense appearance of the drifters' gang, the stagecoach chase and the first attack on the stage station. It concludes with a violent resolution that involves fire and rain, with lighting and betrayal all mixing it up with a lot of death. Some critics have said that the middle of Hangman's Knot, when everyone except the drifters is holed up in the small, two-room station, is slow going. I don't think so. It's just that the middle doesn't have any galloping. What the middle section has is tense character development. We get to know who the people are and see the dynamics of their relationships change, thanks to a shrewd screenplay. I don't want to make too much of this but in the hands of actors like Jeanette Nolan, Frank Faylen, Glenn Langan and Richard Denning Hangman's Knott turns into a pleasant way to spend 81 minutes. While it may not be an A movie, it certainly isn't a B movie, perhaps a strong B-plus. And it's Randolph Scott who makes the difference. He had long ago established himself as a major star. Like Joel McCrea, he liked the outdoors and had enough money and smarts to make the movies he wanted to make, namely Westerns. Most of the movies he made in the Fifties he also produced. Scott was a big guy who aged well and stayed lean. There never was any doubt which side of honor Scott's characters came down on.Watching Randolph Scott handle Lee Marvin is an interesting lesson in star charisma. In this movie, Marvin is modestly billed but has an important role. Five years later inSeven Men From Now (Special Collector's Edition), Marvin is billed third and the movie essentially is about the two of them. Marvin is still the sneering bully who likes to prod the weak. In both movies, Marvin is such a strong presence with his own brand of charisma and vivid unlikablity that not too many star actors could have stood up to him. Scott was 26 years older than Marvin and looks it. Yet it is Scott, in my opinion, who dominates. Marvin steals no scenes he shares with Scott. That, in my view, speaks to Scott's genuine star power. In the movies, assuming the actors are both capable, lip-smacking evil will almost always dominate earnest good. Just look at how Walter Huston stole the show from Edward Arnold inThe Devil & Daniel Webster - Criterion Collection. It takes a rare actor who plays good to dominate another capable actor playing bad. Not many actors had Lee Marvin playing second fiddle. Scott did it twice.The color movie has a good DVD transfer that does justice to all those wide-open spaces in the first third of the movie. There are no extras.