An aspirational western about law enforcement and citizen justice, made in naive times when we attributed all contradictions to the Cold War, and the media distracted us while the economic and political powers prepared the next shock. Everything remains the same or maybe worse in the world: the same thugs ruling, the same injustice and the same dead innocents as usual.
A few years later John Ford made «The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance» and the old maestro opted for a more sober and didactic aesthetic, preferring monochromatism to Eastman, De Luxe or Ansco colours, as he told us a similar story with some irony and disbelief.
Tourneur put on the show with the same efficiency with which he showed us the cat people and Caribbean zombies, but without the punch of «Out of the Past». He was going through a bad patch, with films like «Anne of the Indies», «Way of a Gaucho» and «Appointment in Honduras», made before this one. Luckily, he did not spend more than 66 minutes on it.
A few years later John Ford made «The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance» and the old maestro opted for a more sober and didactic aesthetic, preferring monochromatism to Eastman, De Luxe or Ansco colours, as he told us a similar story with some irony and disbelief.
Tourneur put on the show with the same efficiency with which he showed us the cat people and Caribbean zombies, but without the punch of «Out of the Past». He was going through a bad patch, with films like «Anne of the Indies», «Way of a Gaucho» and «Appointment in Honduras», made before this one. Luckily, he did not spend more than 66 minutes on it.