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Lang does Hawks as well as Hawks does in the first part of this extraordinary Western, before settling down into typical deterministic, dark and guilt-haunted Lang for the finale.
This is one of those films that shows its greatness almost instantly but at the same time very subtly. Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott) is on horseback and being pursued, we know not why -- he stumbles on wounded Edward Creighton (Dean Jagger) and decides to take his gun and horse, but discovering that Creighton is in a bad way, decides to fix him up first. This is conveyed mostly through facial expressions and very brief, clipped dialog - in 2 minutes we know that Shaw is an outlaw, but basically a good guy. Shaw ends up helping Creighton on his way to civilization, then disappears.
Cut to a few weeks or months later, with Creighton on the mend and in charge of an expedition to lay telegraph wire going west from Omaha. He hires Shaw as a scout, who tries to leave when he finds out that Creighton is in charge; but Creighton wants him anyway, repaying a debt and sensing something quality. Also hired is a tenderfoot, son of a benefactor of the project, but atypically the Easterner Richard Blake (Robert Young) is quite competent as he shows right away in an amusing but exciting bronco-busting sequence. Both of the hires vie for Creighton's sister Sue (Virginia Gilmore) who - again not typically - seems quite as able to take care of herself as any man. The camaraderie between the three men, the comedic elements involving an unwilling cook and various rough and tumble types, and the wonderfully played light romantic elements dominate the first third of the film and reminded me more of Howard Hawks' "Red River" or "Only Angels Have Wings" than most Lang - but they are so well played and the action progresses so naturally that it doesn't matter, and doesn't alter our pleasure - if it does perhaps change our expectations - as the more usual Langian themes of the haunted past, dark secrets and the immense pull of the easier, destructive and evil ways come to dominate the later part of the film. Shaw's old pals come back to haunt him as the the wagon train and its wires move westward; attacks mount on the crew, and Shaw has to wrestle with what, if anything, he is to tell Creighton about his tortured relationship with Jack Slade (Barton MacLane), leader of the outlaws.
Beautifully shot in early Technicolor and moving fairly seamlessly from sound stages to western locations, this is for my money easily Lang's best western and one of his very best films, conveying as potently as any of his films the tragic inability of men to escape their pasts and build a new future. Scott is as good as I've seen him, showing more with a flick of an eye than a lot of actors can do in a paragraph of dialog, and the rest of the cast is uniformly fine. The inevitable showdown between Shaw's past criminal life and his potential future is extraordinary, and a surprise even for a longtime Lang devotee such as myself; and even in 1941 it seems there was no place more fraught with meaning on the margins of civilization than the barbershop and the dusty street outside. You can get a shave, you can feel like a new man, but you can't really ever be one as long as the old ties are still holding you back.
Genius.


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