Along the Great Divide [VHS]
Raoul Walsh directed one knockout movie after another in the 1940s, then mostly knockoff movies in the '50s. This trim journey Western typifies his '50s high-average. Kirk Douglas plays a U.S. marshal who interrupts rancher Morris Ankrum's lynching of Walter Brennan. Brennan was rustling some of Ankrum's cattle, no question; what's less certain is whether he also shot the rancher's son in the back. Douglas and deputies John Agar and Ray Teal break up the hanging party and prepare to transport Brennan to jail and trial--with Ankrum's hired guns right behind them, a burning desert ahead, and Brennan's feisty daughter Virginia Mayo coming along to distract Douglas. There's one more distraction: the hint that Brennan may also be Douglas's father--which certainly lends a peculiar coloration to the romantic pull between Douglas and Mayo.Walsh was the oldest of old pros when it came to action pictures, and he and cameraman Sid Hickox give most ofAlong the Great Dividea fine, spare look. Unfortunately, the production habits of the era mandated that crisp action footage shot on location would periodically crash up against studio "exteriors" (e.g., campfire scenes) of blatant artificiality. In addition, Walsh and Hickox were playing around with optical zooms in this period, and although the ones inWhite Heat(1949) andColorado Territory(1949) work beautifully, their counterparts here tend to be badly timed--and mostly just result in the image going suddenly coarse grained and fuzzy.--Richard T. Jameson