Backlash

Plot synopsis:
Jim Slater (Richard Widmark) meets Karyl Orton (Donna Reed) in Gila Valley, Arizona. She thinks that he is searching for a gold cache believed to hidden somewhere in the valley. When a man with a rifle starts shooting at him, Jim wonders if she can be trusted. After Jim kills his foe, he discovers the dead man was a deputy sheriff from Silver City. He takes the body there.
When Sheriff J. C. Marson (Edward Platt) questions him, Jim reveals that he is after the person responsible for his father's death. Jim's father and four other men were besieged and killed by Apaches. Jim believes there was a sixth man who got away and could have gone for help, but instead decided he wanted the gold they found all to himself. Marston reveals that one of the men was the brother of the dead deputy. There are two other brothers, who will want revenge. When Jim refuses to leave town, Marston suggests he go see Sergeant George Lake (Barton MacLane) in Tucson. Lake led the detail that found the massacre victims.
Jim takes his advice, but finds Lake and his men under siege at an isolated trading post. Lake tells Karyl that only three of the bodies could be identified. While there, Karyl stakes her claim to the gold; her husband was another victim of Gila Valley. Lake and Jim sneak out that night and stampede the Apaches' horses, allowing the party to escape. Lake, however, is mortally wounded. Before he dies, he reveals they found a horse bearing the brand of Carson's outfit in Texas.
When Jim returns to Tucson, he encounters Karyl in a hotel, being forced upstairs by a stranger. Karyl calls him by name, whereupon the stranger draws his gun. Jim kills him and wounds another man gunning for him, though he himself is shot in the shoulder. Afterward, Karyl reveals that the dead man is Jeff Welker (Robert J. Wilke) and the survivor his brother Tony (Harry Morgan). Jim slaps her. She tracks him down, tends to his wound, and offers to trade information. Jim kisses her.
When the pair reach their destination, Major Carson (Roy Roberts) tries to recruit Jim against Bonniwell (John McIntire), who has organized the local bandits. Jim is not interested in the upcoming range war, though he does learn that Bonniwell arrived in the region with $60,000, the same amount as the missing gold. One of Carson's gunmen, Johnny Cool (William Campbell), informs Bonniwell of Carson's plans.
Bonniwell gathers his men in town, guns down Sheriff Olson (Robert Foulk) when he tries to keep the peace, and prepares an ambush. He finds Jim locked in the jail. He lets the prisoner out when he learns who he is, then reveals that he is Jim's father, whom Jim had not seen since he was a child. The gold came, not from mining, but via robbery. The others forced Bonniwell out, only to run afoul of the Apaches, leaving him to collect the gold. Disillusioned, Jim wants nothing to do with his father.
Karyl pleads with Jim to leave now, but he wants to warn Carson. When he tries to fire a warning shot, he discovers that Bonniwell gave him back an unloaded gun. Bonniwell chases his son with a knife, but Jim manages to wrestle a gun from one of the bandits and fire. Alerted, Carson has his men surround the town, whereupon the bandits panic and flee. Bonniwell offers to step out of hiding and draw to see which Slater is faster, but he treacherously already has his gun in his hand. Fortunately, Carson's men ride in and fatally shoot him just before Jim steps out in the open.

Tags: murder

Review:
Nifty premise pretty much wasted in decrepit crime programmer.
Backlash is a pretty decrepit programmer built upon a nifty premise: A jealous husband so hates his wife that he frames her for his own murder.
He's a successful lawyer, middle-aged, grey and sporting a Thomas E.
Dewey mustache, and, as such, indistinguishable from just about every other adult male in the cast (which may be among the most anonymous in the history of movies; the collective Q-rating of Backlash would be in the negative numbers).When a burned-out car with a body in it turns up in a ravine, the police potter around trying to find out first who was killed and then who killed him.
There was a cop-killer the lawyer saved from a murder charge; his law partner who owned him big money; the district attorney who may have been seeing his restless younger wife; another temptress connected to both the partner and the cop-killer; and so on.
In fact there are a few too many red herrings squeezed into this compact (66-minute) can.Surprisingly, Backlash boasts one fine scene which looks as though it was cut from a much better movie and spliced in by mistake.
In a railroad yard at night, one of the principals meets up with a drifter who offers to share his bottle and some philosophical musings.
It's filmed as an extended, highly shadowed two-shot that grows tighter and more oppressive as the talk turns to the murder case that dominates the headlines - and then to more urgent concerns.
It's a sequence that makes Backlash almost worth a look..
Ingenious B picture with multiple plot twists.
This is one of those Twentieth Century Fox B pictures about crime and detection made in the forties, with little known actors (I am being polite, frankly they were and are more properly described as 'unknown', and only a few of the actors in such pictures became 'known', a prominent example being Lloyd Nolan, though he does not appear in this one).
It is directed by the regular B picture director, Eugene Forde, who directed many Charlie Chan detective films.
(It is a curious fact that Forde's real name was Ford, and that he added an 'e' on the end, which seems rather affected, don't you think?) The script is by Irving Elman, who the next year did the screenplays for the Bulldog Drummond films 13 LEAD SOLDIERS (1948, see my review) and THE CHALLENGE (1948, see my review).
After those Drummond films, Elman only wrote for television and never returned to features.
Immediately after doing BACKLASH, Elman worked again with Eugene Forde ('He with the E') twice again, and wrote JEWELS OF BRANDENBURG (1947) and THE CRIMSON KEY (1947), both directed by Forde.
The plot of this film is somewhat contorted.
A criminal lawyer meets up with a former criminal client who has just robbed a bank and wants to leave a bundle of money with him.
Then the lawyer's car is found burnt out, having gone over a California cliff.
What appears to be his body is inside, with .25 calibre bullets in the heart.
(Strange that.
Was Elman unfamiliar with that inescapable American accessory, a gun?) Then the gun is found and it belongs to the lawyer's wife, who is having an affair with the District Attorney.
Murkier and murkier!
The criminal, with the literally colourful name of Red, disappears.
But then he reappears.
He says he did not kill the lawyer.
The film is full of flashbacks when the various characters narrate their recollections to each other and to the police.
These work very well.
Who really wants to kill whom and why?
There are red herrings aplenty swimming around in circles, and some of them are salted.
This is all good entertainment for those who enjoy crumby old black and white B pictures.
I like watching them because I am absolutely fascinated by the manners and mores of the people portrayed, as they vary from decade to decade.
Every decade, the character types cease to exist and are replaced by new types more typical of their times.
For instance, if you searched the whole of America today from Maine to Florida and from South Carolina to Seattle, you could not find a single person like any of the characters in this film.
They have all gone.
There are no people like that anymore.
Sociologists should give much more attention to these things, and should watch old movies like hawks for signs of vanishing species of individual.
This film has only been reviewed by one other person, ten years ago, and he was absolutely right to call attention to the one strange expressionistic scene where two people, one a hobo (uncredited and what is more, unlisted as a character in the IMDb credits) and the other a desperate man on the run, both crouching in what was then called a 'flop' at night, are talking to one another.
This unusual scene does indeed look like it came from another movie, and it is as if a different director and cameraman were used to shoot it.
Wouldn't it be interesting to know what lay behind this anomaly?
Well, we will never know, but it is fun to spot such things, and can even beat trying to guess whodunnit..
Good Noir from Fox. This is a lightweight noir from 20th Century Fox's B division -- competent players, no major stars, Eugene Forde directing, with a nicely tangled plot.
John Eldredge is dead and the obvious suspects are his wife, Jean Rogers, and his his business partner, Robert Shayne.
His doctor reports he's been dosed with poison a couple of times, but he has not reported it at Eldredge's insistence, and Shayne owed him a lot of money.
But there are some complicating factors and as cops Richard Benedict and Larry Blake follow the clues, the district attorney takes an interest.
Is that actually Eldredge's corpse?Fox would shut down B production the next year -- Sol Wurtzel, the division head, was almost universally despised as a vulgarian, and only the fact that his movies always made money kept him in business.
However, the long post-war downturn in movie-going was starting, and Wurtzel would retire in 1948..
A bit talky...but not that bad..
"Backlash" is clearly a B-movie.
Its short running time (a little over an hour), absence of big-name stars and overall plot practically scream B!
And, as far as B-movies go, it's okay...just okay.John Moreland doesn't like his life nor his wife, though he's kept this very much to himself.
So, when he sees an opportunity, he fakes his own death AND implicates his wife as his murderer!
Naturally, the plan doesn't go off without a hitch, as the film was made during the era when crime certainly did NOT pay!The story isn't bad but the film often resorts too much to talk...and the talkiness of the picture didn't help it.
In addition, it features one of the worst and most over-used clichés in mystery films...the guy who calls up and says "I can't tell you over the phone...can you come over here right away?".
You just KNOW that the guy'll be dead before anyone arrives to help him or hear his evidence!
These are reasons why I think this is a purely average time-passer and not something with a bit more to offer..
A little too much desperation to be really believable..
The genre of film noir has tried too many ways to explain the desperation of destructive characters to get away with immoral behavior, and most of the times, they work, but sometimes they do not.
Such is the case for this B programmer rushed out of 20th Century Fox's second-string unit.
What starts off as intriguing ends up being a convoluted, unbelievable mess that involves the murder of powerful Attorney John Eldridge and the attempts to pin the crime on several different characters including his wife (Jean Rogers), a client (Douglas Fowley) and his partner (Robert Shayne).
But it is obvious that something suspicious is up, and if you were will spend 66 minutes trying to unravel the ball of yarn that is impossible to untangle.The film gets very talky at several points throughout its brief running time, and even attempt to be poetic in certain ways makes it seem pretentious as well as outlandish.
I could make the attempt to try to untangle it for those curious about it, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.
To top off the complexity of the story is a rather silly tag put on that has a completely different mood than the rest of the film, showing desperation from the writers to tie it all up.
Technically, the film is a bit better in that aspect, so one can enjoy some great photography and interesting camera shots, and while some of the characters have interesting backstories, it's not enough to make this one a success.