THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF (Gritos en la noche, 1962)

Fifty years on, I'm sure I'm not the first observer to ask what the point is of having a minion do your kidnapping for you when you have to go with him on his errands. Why have a minion if he can't take care of business while you do your all-important experimentation in the comfort of your own lair? Instead, Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon) has to hang around outside the homes of beautiful young so he can guide his minion, Morpho (Ricardo Valle) through the streets by tapping on the cobblestones with his cane. Morpho's very prominent eyes appear to be of no use to him, so how much use can he be for the doctor, who went to the trouble of faking Morpho's death by execution, in his former capacity as a prison doctor, just so Morpho could be his minion? Maybe Orloff fears that the targeted women could beat him up. Yet he's quite capable of slipping one a mickey when it's convenient, but on the other hand he's not observant enough to notice when the victim, having noticed the obvious ploy, doesn't bother drinking the stuff. Most likely Orloff knows his limitations, some of the time.

Orloff would become a magic word (as would Morpho) in the universe of Jess Franco, who made his first international success writing and directing Gritos en la noche and would litter many subsequent movies with Orloffs and Morphos the way spaghetti western producers littered the Old West with Djangos. For Franco it was a gimmick and a fetish at the same time; that's why exploitation cinema fascinates us. With The Awful Dr. Orloff (so named, I presume, for its U.S. pairing with The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock) Franco aspires to place his personal stamp on familiar archetypes. The basic story is old news but also very recent. Orloff needs to experiment on his lovely young victims to cure his disfigured daughter. It had to take tremendous self-confidence in one's own personal vision to tell such a story so soon after Georges Franju had told it in Eyes Without a Face (1959) and Giorgio Ferroni had in Mill of the Stone Women (1960). The idea goes back further, of course, at least as far as Wallace Fox's The Corpse Vanishes (1942), though in that Monogram epic Bela Lugosi -- whose contemptuous attitude toward minions is echoed in Orloff's treatment of Morpho -- is trying to cure his wife rather than his daughter. So the idea is nothing new, and it was up to Franco to make it fresh.

While Franco benefits from the black-and-white cinematography of Godofredo Pacheco, it's the music he uses that really distinguishes Orloff from the field. Despite the Belle Epoque setting, the score by Jose Pagan and Antonio Ramirez Angel is discordantly modern and eclectic, heavy on percussion but also haunted with weird whistling effects. It would make you take notice even if Franco wasn't doing his job. His own special contribution, I suppose, is a modern infusion of fetishism and just plain sleaze. For those countries that would tolerate them, he includes a handful of topless shots of captive women. Scenes of women chained and behind bars are the most obvious signs (apart from the villain names) that this otherwise antique-looking item is a Jess Franco film. He may not truly have come into his own until he began working regularly in color, but his personal touch is already present here.

Typical of Franco also, I suppose, is the transcendence of hackneyed plotting by evocative imagery. As in many future films, Orloff takes place in a world of idiot cops and reporters. Conversations at police headquarters are often the low points of Franco films, and Orloff sets the tone by giving us a dense hero in Inspector Tanner (Conrado San Martin). Franco milks the final reel for suspense by highlighting Tanner's stupidity. His girlfriend (Diana Lorys) has set herself up as bait for the kidnapper/killer, seen through Orloff's attempt to slip her a mickey, and pretended to pass out so she can be taken to his lair. She has hastily written Tanner a note explaining her ploy and sent a messenger to deliver it. To Franco's credit, he gives Tanner a reason to ignore the note. All through the picture, idiots and crazy people have been plaguing him with false clues and fake confessions. When a messenger hands him the note without saying who it's from, he assumes it's another crank at work. It's not until he's about to go to bed that night that he bothers reading it and finally rushes to the rescue. Fortunately the girl is not so competent that Tanner has nothing to do. In the end the damsel has to be in distress; that's part of the ritual. You could call this mockery of stupid authority figures or just stupid writing. But there's something undeniably compelling about the imagery, even if little is original in it. Like his peers (Jean Rollin, Paul Naschy and his collaborators) Franco understood the captivating power of gothic imagery and animating gothic ideas, obviously being captivated by them himself. Even the absurd Morpho, who looks like a hybrid of Christopher Lee's Dracula and his Frankenstein Monster, plus fake eyeballs, is indisputably compelling. You can't take your eyes off him, even if only because you keep expecting the actor to crash into furniture or trip and fall. He's creepy in the old manner of the dehumanized horrors of such films as White Zombie or Island of Lost Souls. His handicaps make him ludicrous as a minion, but something like him needs to be in such a film. And this sort of story has already been done so many times that what once may have been dismissed as mere mechanical or mercenary reproduction arguably acquires an unconscious compulsive logic. For a Franco fan, especially, Orloff can seem like a film that has to exist, or can't help existing. For a more objective auteurist, the film's true subject may be the need, simultaneously commercial and psychological, to tell the story, or our need to have the story told over again.

Postscript: Jess Franco has died at age 82 following a stroke suffered last week. Follow this link for this blog's reviews of Franco films, with more likely to come in the near future.

Gabriel Over the White House: Now Playing, MARCH 29, 1933

Less than one month after the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, media mogul William Randolph Hearst and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio present their fantasy of what a new President ought to do.

Directed by Gregory La Cava, Gabriel Over the White House is one of 1933's most retroactively disturbing pictures and perhaps the year's most overt expression of a widespread longing for strongman government bordering on dictatorship from which most people (including Hearst, who soon turned against FDR) quickly retreated. Reportedly it was too strong even for its time, at least in its original form. Cinema czar Will Hays ordered last-minute cuts of material presumably even more provocative than what we have left. Meanwhile, Hearst heavily promoted this picture, one of his Cosmopolitan productions released in collaboration with  M-G-M. The Hearst-owned Milwaukee Sentinel ran a serial novelization of the story. A rival paper, the Journal, ran this review; the reviewer didn't hold the film's paternity against it.

Gabriel's fantasy has a constraint built in. The film's premise is that only divine intervention can give the country the leadership it needs. Until then, President Judd Hammond (Walter Huston) is little more than a boob, largely indifferent to the nation's pressing problems. He becomes a changed man after miraculously surviving a car wreck, but it's a kind of mixed miracle once it dawns on us that Hammond maybe didn't really survive. Instead, and to justify the title, an aide speculates that the President has been possessed by none other than the Archangel Gabriel, who for some reason has a special interest in the United States. Advertisement and review alike describe the transformed Hammond as "of the people;" in fact he is a virtual dictator, cutting "red tape" like so many Gordian Knots. Such leadership is needed not just to kickstart the economy but to deal with the problem of organized crime. The movie blames immigrants for much of the gangster plague, and in a brutally symbolic scene a number of gang leaders are executed by firing squad at Ellis Island (if I recall right) while numerous others are deported under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty. Despite everything, a belief in limited government still prevails insofar as Hammond, like the dictators of the Roman Republic, has a specific mandate for action. When his mission is accomplished, culminated by the signing of an international peace treaty (after the great powers are brought to the table by a U.S. weapons buildup) the guiding spirit leaves the body and Hammond drops dead. Gabriel is a film impossible to appraise in conventional good-or-bad terms since it is so much a document of its time, more a political than an artistic statement. It's one of 1933's most fascinating cinematic events.

DVR Diary: THE PAGAN (1929)

 

Things changed fast during the conversion from silence to sound. Attitudes changed -- the Depression had a lot to do with that -- which is why I don't often include silent movies in the Pre-Code Parade. Here's an example: Pre-Code's idea of a noble savage is Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan; silent cinema's idea, at least as demonstrated in The Pagan, is Ramon Novarro. That's a big difference, and it reflects a changing idea of the primitive. "Nature in the raw is seldom mild" was a catchphrase of the Pre-Code era -- it was an advertising slogan for Lucky Strike cigarettes. The men who became stars in those years were rugged, violent types -- Cagney, Gable, Weissmuller in his special niche. "Caveman" was a word often used to describe such personalities. M-G-M's Tarzan lived in a world of perpetual violence; animals were always out to eat him or Jane, or simply to kill them for the savage pleasure of it. Part of Weissmuller's appeal for Pre-Code (i.e. Depression)  audiences, apart from his being a stud, was Tarzan's obvious prowess as a provider. Ramon Novarro's Henry Shoesmith could hardly be more different in his indifference to basic economics. He's no weakling, as W. S. Van Dyke's picture will prove, but whereas for Tarzan the primitive world is a jungle, for Shoesmith it's a paradise. He's a half-caste, orphaned son of a white father and native mother -- the opposite combination was probably unacceptable to contemporary audiences -- and heir to a sizable plantation on a South Seas island. He takes after his mom, a title tells us, which means he lives like a native, loinclothed, negligent of the general store his father had built, flourishing on the fat of the land. And the film asks: why not? For Van Dyke Pagan was a follow-up to White Shadows in the South Seas, his collaboration with documentarian Robert Flaherty, and like that film this one was largely shot on location to picturesque effect. Like White Shadows, Pagan portrays island life as innocent and unworldly and menaced by the "white shadow" of commercial exploitation. In Pagan the shadow takes the especially menacing form of an earringed Donald Crisp as Slater, a trader in search of copra, the raw material for coconut oil. He has a half-caste ward, Tito (Dorothy Janis), whom he's zealously trying to civilize and Christianize. Slater is scandalized at Shoesmith's neglect of his business and his backslide into paganism, and is even more alarmed at his obvious interest in Tito, as is Madge (Renee Adoree), Henry's American would-be girlfriend. It's a one-sided culture clash, since Henry isn't interested in clashing. He just doesn't get Slater's attitude. "I don't get angry just because you're different," he chides the trader. In fact, he goes overboard to be accommodating in his naivete. Slater wants to buy Henry's coconuts to harvest them for copra, but Henry lets him have them for free. He has too many and he'd get sick if he tried to consume them all himself.

Henry does take some of Slater's advice to heart. The trader holds out the possibility that Henry might win Tito's hand if he becomes more of a responsible businessman. Inspired, Henry briefly turns into something like Harold Lloyd, bumbling with bolts of cloth as women wait impatiently in his store. He still doesn't really get it, however, since he lets everyone buy on credit. After all, he just borrows more from the bank whenever he needs supplies -- but little does he realize that a trap has been set for him. Slater is the banker, and when the loans come due he's not content simply to "write it in the book" as Henry does with his customers. He forecloses instead, while Henry retreats with a shrug to a hut deeper inland, with Tito in tow. But Slater never seriously intended Henry to win her; he wants the girl for himself, despite Madge's warning that Henry is half-native, and "natives take their women." Slater proves good at taking himself, but Madge (who sees the hopelessness of her own situation but still likes Henry and Tito) has an answer for that, too. Henry is also half-white, of course, and "white men fight for their women." A distinction without a difference? Perhaps. Either way, it means that Henry and Slater are going to have it out in a wobbly rowboat as the sharks circle closer....

Only three years separate The Pagan from Tarzan the Ape Man, also directed by Van Dyke, but the cultural gulf seems far more vast. Nothing may illustrate that more starkly than M-G-M's decision to promote The Pagan as the debut of Ramon Novarro's singing voice. For the most part, the vocal track is pretty poorly synched to the image on screen, indicating that most of the picture was actually shot silent. This sparked some suspicion that Novarro, like his imagined contemporary Lina Lamont and his real-life peer Richard Barthelmess, didn't do his own singing. But viewers familiar with the look of part-talkies will notice at least two moments, both brief, where the speed of the film changes and Novarro actually appears to be singing "live" for the camera. One of these moments comes toward the end of the clip shown below, uploaded by frankieparis16.


This may not be your idea of what a "Pagan Love Song" sounds like, but it does express silent Hollywood's ideal of idyllic "pagan" life, at least as lived in the South Pacific. That idyllic ideal persisted into the Pre-Code idea and beyond in films like Bird of Paradise, but for Depression audiences the dystopia of Africa and the myth of an animalistic hunter-provider proved more compelling. With that change came a turnover in male talent that was perhaps most pronounced at Novarro's studio, where many of the leading men of M-G-M's late silents -- including John Gilbert, William Haines and Buster Keaton -- were gone within five years of The Pagan. Novarro himself held out longest of this group, thanks to his versatility as an all-purpose ethnic, but by 1934 M-G-M was done with him as well, while he-man Clark Gable had become King of the lot if not of all Hollywood and brutish Wallace Beery was one of the studio's biggest stars. Sound and the Depression had a lot to do with this, as silent archetypes became obsolete and newly revealed voices undermined actors' images. On its own merits The Pagan is an entertaining oddity, likely to be embraced for its criticism of capitalist values, but the film's real value is as a document of the fantasies of a specific moment in American history. It seems archaic now, after 84 years, but it probably seemed archaic after 4 years, and not just because it didn't talk. Nevertheless, it tells us something, depending on how we look at it.

Now Playing: MARCH 26, 1933

The shadows are lengthening as indignation over cinematic immorality spreads slowly across the country. In the news this week, Dr. Eastman of Chicago tells a Milwaukee audience that censorship won't solve the problem because it doesn't reach the root of it. Rather than edit questionable films, there should be some way to prevent them from being made.

Meanwhile, on with the show! After three weeks The 7th Commandment takes its leave of the Garden theater, to be replaced with a title familiar to fans of the time, though the content seems to be different from what old-timers remember.

Once upon a time The Face on the Barroom Floor was a ballad telling the sad tale of an artist ruined by lost love and alcohol. Charlie Chaplin parodied the poem in a 1914 Keystone short, but the film advertised above is a perhaps-straightfaced, perhaps-campy melodrama -- the advertising definitely leans toward camp -- in which Bramwell ("He went out for a little walk!") Fletcher's life goes to hell when he gives in to peer pressure and gets drunk at a wild party. If it lives up to the ad it'll be a gem.

A couple of more familiar titles open together at the Warner.

Here's my review of Barbara Stanwyck's woman-in-prison picture. I haven't reviewed Lawyer Man but I have seen it. William Powell may be hard to by as a shyster who rose from the slums and forgot his ethnic roots and virtues, but the movie's entertaining enough regardless.

Star teams are reunited in two releases this week, starting with the Wisconsin.

Never heard of this team? Neither had I, but Bad Girl, Dunn and Eilers's first teaming, was enough of a picture to earn Frank Borzage a Best Director Oscar. Sailor's Luck was the fourth teamup, but they only made one more.

Which team was more popular, Dunn & Eilers or Sidney & Murray?

This is the sixth and last film in a comedy series dating back to 1926. The Cohens and Kellys films are an early milestone of Hollywood multiculturalism, being the adventures of Jewish and Irish families uneasily united by marriage, the comedy focusing on the misadventures of the antagonistic fathers played by Sidney and Murray. I've never seen any of these pictures -- has anyone lately?

Finally, a drifter unwittingly gets involved in a car-stealing racket and falls in love along the way.

The title seems to summarize Dr. Eastman's feelings about Hollywood as a whole.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN (Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica, 1971)

In his imperfect English, Franco Nero describes this film from the late director Damiano Damiani as the "most sold" movie in the history of Italian cinema. What he means is that Confessions of a Police Captain played in more countries around the world than any previous Italian film. This fact must gall him, since he reports that the producers never paid him for his work. That may explain why he didn't do his own dubbing for the English-language edition. The effect is mixed, since Nero is one of the few Italian actors whose own voice was readily recognized by American audiences. But doing without Nero's voice preempts any confusion over why his character alone has an accent while his co-star Martin Balsam, doing his own dubbing, clearly doesn't. Nero encouraged Damiani to cast Balsam after both star and producer had rejected Anthony Quinn and Ben Gazzara -- the latter had already committed to the film -- because both actors insisted on changes in the story and its location. Nero had seen Balsam in Catch-22 and other films and thought he looked Sicilian. It was a good break for Balsam, who could depend on work in Europe for years afterward, and he's a surprisingly authoritative figure in the title role. The picture itself is a potent urban tragedy, a portrayal of a government so rotten with corruption that two essentially honest (or at least good) men are unable to trust one another in the fight against crime.

Balsam is Captain (more correctly, Commisario) Bonavia, first seen paying a visit to a lockup for the criminally insane, where he orders the release of an atypically fastidious prisoner. Only days later, the ex-prisoner shoots up an office building, dying soon afterward of wounds inflicted by the guards. Bonavia seems to have expected this to happen, but he's surprised to learn that one person in particular wasn't killed and wasn't even there. He has to assume that the apparent target, one D'Amrbosio, was tipped off to the impending attack. Meanwhile, newly arrived assistant prosecutor Traini (Nero) finds the situation fishy as he learns more about the circumstances of the con's release. He can guess that Bonavia is up to something, but the reason remains a mystery. Meanwhile, Bonavia regards anyone else on the case as an impediment or a threat.

Bonavia and Traini circle one anoter warily and with increasing hostility as Traini sets up a meeting with the otherwise-elusive D'Ambrosio to learn why the ex-con or someone higher up would want to kill him. Finally Bonavia has to put his cards on the table, explaining to Traini his grudge against D'Ambrosio. It has to do with his failure to convict D'Ambrosio for the murder of a union agitator ten years ago, mainly because an eyewitness to the killing, a shepherd boy, had "accidentally" fallen off a cliff. D'Ambrosio controls the workforce on corrupt construction projects and is tight with local businessmen and politicians. That makes him virtually untouchable for Bonavia; hence his recourse to assassination, relying on a man whose family had a grudge against D'Ambrosio and whose sister (Marilu Tolo) has information on D'Amrbosio's more lethal activities. When Bonavia takes her into his personal custody, it only makes him look worse in Traini's eyes, since the prosecutor still suspects more venal motives on the Commisario's part. The gears of justice only seem to tighten the noose around Bonavia's neck, thanks in part to Traini's naivete, until the police captain feels compelled to take even more drastic steps to secure justice ...

Confessions may be the most pessimistic -- or cynical, depending on how you see it -- of Damiani's crime films, though it leaves open an actually strong possibility that Traini may finally do the right thing. It leaves you questioning what he could accomplish, however, given the systematic, self-reinforcing and demoralizing corruption in Sicily. The movie is clear kin to Italy's tough-cop movies from the same decade but is clearly more ambivalent about the apparent necessity of cops bending or breaking rules than the average Maurizio Merli or Tomas Milian vehicle. Balsam does a lot to sustain the ambivalence, avoiding the self-righteous hysteria we might expect from his role. When he blows his stack, it's in frustration with the system, while his vendetta against D'Ambrosio is a more cold-blooded affair, explained in matter-of-fact fashion. There's a growing resignation in his character, again best expressed by the actor's restraint when he realizes that Traini has unwittingly doomed another character. You remain convinced throughout of his authentic moral indignation, but it's Balsam's underplaying, his refusal to let you think his character is crazy, that keeps the Commisario a sympathetic and ultimately tragic figure. I can only judge Nero fairly by his physical presence in the English edition but Damiani again exploits a certain earnest shallowness he can make the actor project, as he did in a similar role in Day of the Owl. It's to Nero's credit that he liked working with Damiani even when the roles weren't flattering. I'd like to see The Case is Closed, the prison movie they made together between this and How to Kill a Judge, but I don't know if it's available in any English language form. I do have How to Kill a Judge at hand, so look forward to a review of that title in the near future.

DVR Diary: PORT OF SHADOWS (Quai des brumes, 1938)

The French were in Vietnam long before us Americans, so it's only fair that France gives us cinema's first troubled Vietnam veteran. To be honest, I don't know for certain that Jean Gabin's character in Marcel Carne's crime drama is the first, but he's got us beat by more than a generation. Jean had some bad experiences with the colonial army in Tonkin and has been living in a kind of fog ever since. Back in France, he's deserted from the army but needs a change of clothes. He hitchhikes to Le Havre, nearly wrecking his ride by making it swerve to avoid a dog in the road. He's tender but tough, we'll learn. In the port city, he ends up in a waterfront tavern where he meets a depressed artist and a pretty young woman (Michele Morgan) and gets caught between some gangsters and an eccentric old man (Michel Simon) with an axe to grind about music. Quite conveniently, the artist commits suicide by going out into the water and bequeaths Jean his clothes and his identity papers, while the bartender wraps Jean's uniform around a rock and sinks them, hoping to hide the evidence of desertion. It doesn't quite work, and when the uniform pops up along with a body other than the artist's, investigators suspect a soldier in a gangland murder. Jean has no patience with the gangsters and spends a lot of time slapping around their leader, Lucien (Pierre Brasseur), whose bluster barely conceals some essential weakness. After a while, however, you'll wonder who the real bad guy is as we learn more about the ties between the Morgan and Simone characters. Jean falls for Morgan and Simon doesn't like it. But as the old man's menace dominates the story we'd all be wise not to forget Lucien's sulking, simmering rage.

Quai des Brunes often feels as if it was made by a French branch of Warner Bros. Gabin's take-no-crap toughness and redeeming romantic streak wouldn't be out of place on the actual Warner lot, while the short-lived plot detail of the suicidal artist may have been intentionally reminiscent of The Petrified Forest. Rather than imitating the Americans, however, Gabin had been setting a new standard for doomed antiheroes since his international breakthrough Pepe le Moko in 1936, and you could argue that his movies had some thematic influence on Warners' second major gangster cycle. The film as a whole is atmospherically gritty and romantically tragic in proto-noirish style. It has several strong set pieces, including an encounter between Jean and Lucien on bumper cars and a scene of Simon menacing Morgan set to some lovely music reminding us of Simon's pretentious tastes while the action belies his pretension. Simon and Brasseur make nicely contrasting villains, one burly and increasingly brutish, the other deceptively fussy and wussy. Overall, Port of Shadows can stand comparison with contemporary crime-film classics from the U.S. If you like them, you'll like this.

DVR Diary: RAILS INTO LARAMIE (1954)

 

Here's an unpretentious Hollywood western from the genre's golden era. Jesse Hibbs will never be mentioned alongside the major western directors of the Fifties like Mann, Boetticher and Daves, but he was a western specialist for the most part -- his best-known work is most likely the Audie Murphy-as-himself biopic To Hell and Back -- before becoming a TV director in the Sixties. The cast interested me more than the director. John Payne has fresh credibility as a tough-guy star with the rediscovery of Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, while Dan Duryea needs no introduction as a reliable villain. At his side is Lee Van Cleef in one of his more substantial early roles. The story, for which two writers share credit while Borden Chase did some doctoring, is a fairly typical town-tamer affair given a little extra grit by Payne. He plays Jeff Harder, an underachieving Army sergeant with a habit of starting brawls in saloons -- he doesn't like cheating. After getting his ass kicked in one such brawl, he's given a choice between the guardhouse and a mission to expedite railroad construction in Laramie WY. Widespread malingering has slowed progress and local business interests are complicit in it -- they don't want the workers and their regular paychecks to leave town. Among these businessmen is Jim Shanessy (Duryea), the archetypal corrupt saloonkeeper, who happens also to be an old crony of Harder's. Their friendly reunion is short-lived, however, once Harder realizes that Shanessy is the power behind the construction slowdowns. He also happens to resent the Harder gang's attempts to bribe him, and he doesn't like Ace, Shanessy's enforcer (Van Cleef)  on general principles.

After inspecting the construction site and beating workgang leader Pike Murphy (Charles Horvath) into temporary submission, Harder realizes that only drastic steps will restore discipline and get the rails laid on schedule. Authorized by the army to take any steps necessary, he goes over the head of Graham (Barton McLane), the men's actual employer, and fires the entire construction gang, allowing them to return to work only on his terms. This move scandalizes the town fathers, since no income for the workers means no sales for them. At a public meeting they urge Harder to rescind his order. He doesn't back down, telling them, "I don't think there's an honest businessman in this town." Here's another instance in which westerns seemed to subtly challenge entrepreneurial values. It isn't the first time I've seen a Fifties western in which town fathers hinder a hero's town-taming because they like the untamed folks's money as much as anyone else's. If these films aren't challenging entrepreneurship itself, they do suggest that there are higher values than making money, and that civilization wouldn't get very far if people cared only for profit. Harder chides Shanessy at one point, noting that with his brains he could get rich honestly. "Not as rich and not as fast" is Shanessy's answer. More than many contemporary westerns, Rails hails women as a civilizing force. Taking advantage of Wyoming history -- the territory was the first to grant considerable civil equality to women, Harder tries to secure Shanessy's conviction on a murder charge -- he'd had Ace kill Harder's deputy -- by seating an all-female jury in a criminal trial for the first time in American history. Before this, the town's all-male juries had routinely acquitted Shanessy's men. It looks like the deck is still stacked against Harder when one of the jurors is Lou Carter (Mari Blanchard), Shanessy's partner in his saloon. It seems unlikely that someone with such a conflict of interests would be allowed on the jury, but she surprises everyone by voting to convict Shanessy. If anything, the film is too quick to have her emphasize that she did this for sound legal and moral reasons, and not to take over the saloon. By now she's become Harder's love interest so I guess she has to be a good girl.

Being a town western, Rails lacks the sweep of many of the decade's best westerns. Hibbs's focus is on personal confrontations, and he invests the several showdowns of Payne and Van Cleef with a decent crackle of hostile energy. The biggest spectacle in the film is its use of trains. Shanessy's men jump Harder and dump him on an outbound train so he can't testify at the trial; when Harder comes to, he orders the engineer to back the train all the way to Laramie. Later, Harder and Shanessy fight on a train on a collision course with another engine on the same track; once again the train goes backwards to get out of harm's way while the other train brakes. There's no real revelation here, though Payne readily projects a take-no-crap attitude and Van Cleef shows his promise. Duryea is relatively uninspired in a too-generic villain role, neither too crazy nor too torn over his failing friendship with the hero. Rails Into Laramie goes in a few interesting directions but never quite escapes a tolerable mediocrity. Tolerable counts for something, though, and there's enough going on in the picture that western fans won't think their time wasted.