John Sturges is one of my favorite work-horse directors from the fifties and sixties. He was an expert craftsman, capable of churning out a series of competent, entertaining genre films, and who, when presented with stellar material, could produce a masterpiece (Bad Day at Black Rock, The Great Escape). Although he produced a smattering of work in various genres, Sturges excelled mostly in Westerns. His Western actioner Last Train from Gun Hill, although full of grand ambitions, falls mainly into the competent genre exercise category.
Sturges did certainly attempt to provoke viewers with this picture, however. The Production Code folks, in particular, most likely had some words with the director over the content of this film, specifically with the attack scene that opens it. An Indian woman, riding with her white son, is brutally raped and murdered by a pair of cowboys as she attempts to ride back to town to see her husband Marshal Matt Morgan (Kirk Douglas). Not only is this scene especially violent for the time it was produced, it (and much of the film that follows) also touches on many taboo film subjects from the time: miscegenation, racism, sexual assault, police corruption. Not that this film is a sermonizing message picture. Sturges ably delivers the genre goods in an engrossing story.
After learning of his wife's murder, some intrepid detective work lands Morgan in the nearby Gun Hill, a lawless town run by the ruthless cattle baron (and former best friend of Morgan) Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn). After discovering that Belden's son Rick (Earl Holliman), was one of the men responsible, Morgan seizes him and holes up in a hotel room while waiting for the last train from Gun Hill (hey, that's the name of the movie). Belden, torn between his friendship with Morgan and his love for his piece of shit son, soon hires an army of thugs to lay siege to Morgan in the hopes of rescuing Rick.
Last Train from Gun Hill is a hodgepodge of slightly superior Westerns from the same era (3:10 to Yuma immediately comes to mind). That's not to say that Sturges' picture doesn't have its moments. A scene in which an enraged Morgan explains in agonizingly vivid detail to Rick how he will kill the young murderer the slow white way (using the Justice system), is perhaps the most cold-blooded, bad-ass speech I've heard uttered in a revenge picture. Much of the film that surrounds this scene, however, is just good enough.
[The trailer:]
Dave's Rating:
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