Product: Hangman's Knot (1952)
Rating: 4.0
Is it that easy to kill a man?
The only feature film directed by Roy Huggins, who also wrote the screenplay and made a career as a writer for TV westerns and crime dramas, as well as writing a few other films in the noir and western genres in the late 40s and early 50s, HANGMAN'S KNOT is on the surface a rather typical men-holed-up-against-superior-odds tale, but it has enough neat little twists, and good enough characterizations to make it stand out as above average in Randolph Scott's impressive 1950s filmography. With exteriors done in the same Alabama Hills where the more famous Ranown series films with Budd Boetticher were shot a few years later, and with production handled by Harry Joe Brown with assistance from the star, it's no surprise that the film starts out with something of the look and feel of the later films - with one cardinal difference, and that being that Scott isn't a man alone here.This time out he's Major Matt Stewart, leader of a small company of Confederate soldiers bent on ambushing a Union stagecoach full of gold. This the group does, killing a dozen bluecoats, but at the cost of three of their own. The five men take the gold for a rendezvous with Stewart's commander, Captain Petersen, but not before they've heard a dying Northerner blurt out that the war is over. Turns out the Captain knew about it, which prompts the angry and hotheaded Rolph (Lee Marvin) to shoot him dead on the spot. Stewart keeps his cool, knowing he'll need his most experienced man if they're to fend off posses and marshals, and get back home. What to do with the gold is discussed, but not decided before the group waylays another stagecoach with a couple of passengers, Lee Kemper (Richard Denning) and Molly Hull (Donna Reed), his fiancee. With a larger posse in hot pursuit, Stewart and his men make it to a way station and hold up there, and this becomes the setting for the last 2/3 of the film.The tension in HANGMAN'S KNOT is built up very well; of course we know, this being a conventional 50s western, that Scott's hero character will pull through, but the rest of it we're allowed to keep guessing. There is also a theme of when and how violence can be justified running through the film - the quote I used for my title is from early in the film, and represents the difference between the Major, who hates to kill and tries to avoid it, and Rolph, who cares nothing about anything but his own hide and pleasure. Marvin's character soon attains the role of chief antagonist, even as the Major and his men find that they can't necessarily trust Molly or Lee, or the daughter (Jeanette Nolan) of the old and relatively friendly station agent (Clem Bevans), who hates the Confederates for the deaths of her husband and son. Complicating matters further is the growing evidence that the posse that has them penned in are nothing more than bandits themselves - and their capture of one of the Major's men (Frank Faylen). The men explore various ways to get out of their predicament and keep coming up short, but events partially out of their control conspire to force them to take action quickly.It's all very nicely put together and beautifully photographed in Technicolor by Charles Lawton Jr., with Scott and Marvin the standouts in an excellent cast; they make a fine couple of adversaries and I wish they'd gotten to work against each other more often. Marvin is in the typical vicious mode he played so often early on - but with less humor than usual - and Scott is upright and moral as always, but also rather sad and a bit fatalistic. I do have a problem with the weaselly character of Lee; maybe I've just seen too many craven fiancee/boyfriend/husband characters in westerns of this period (especially Randolph Scott westerns), and it's getting old. And the scenes with Nolan's Mrs. Harris and the young Jamie, a boyish surrogate son to the Major, as the two try to mend the hatreds of North and South in one night of discussions just come off as a little too well-meaning and Hollywood. But these are very minor complaints, and one could say that, on the flipside, they're signs that this simple genre was always trying to add some nuance to the tired old cliches - even if sometimes they were just creating new cliches in the process.If I had to boil it down to just a few words, I'd just say this: Randolph Scott could do no wrong in the films he made from about 1950 on, so get this and all of them if you're a fan.