NOTES: First film produced by Plato Skouras was made entirely in Mexico. Originally, Andre De Toth was signed to direct.
COMMENT: It's an amazing thing, but the most dramatically attractive deployments of CinemaScope were not generally found in products of the Hollywood "A" feature factories, but in Continental pictures like "The Great War" and "No Sun in Venice", and in independent "B" movies like this one.
Superbly photographed by Alex Phillips, one of the world's greatest masters of color cinematography, "Sierra Baron" offers scenic vistas of such pictorial splendor, that the human eye can hardly take them all in. I strongly advise viewers not to sit too close to the screen but take a back seat in the theater where the full, brilliantly framed panoramas, stunningly composed and strikingly vivid in color and contrast, will hit the spectator to the fullest extent of all their wide-wide-screen excitements.
Unfortunately, aside from the music score (one of the best emanating from the Sawtell-Shefter team), the rest of the film is nowhere up to the Phillips standard. Clark's direction, Branch's script, and the performances of such luminaries as Brian Keith, Rick Jason, Mala Powers and Steve Brodie, could all best be described as no more than passably routine.
COMMENT: It's an amazing thing, but the most dramatically attractive deployments of CinemaScope were not generally found in products of the Hollywood "A" feature factories, but in Continental pictures like "The Great War" and "No Sun in Venice", and in independent "B" movies like this one.
Superbly photographed by Alex Phillips, one of the world's greatest masters of color cinematography, "Sierra Baron" offers scenic vistas of such pictorial splendor, that the human eye can hardly take them all in. I strongly advise viewers not to sit too close to the screen but take a back seat in the theater where the full, brilliantly framed panoramas, stunningly composed and strikingly vivid in color and contrast, will hit the spectator to the fullest extent of all their wide-wide-screen excitements.
Unfortunately, aside from the music score (one of the best emanating from the Sawtell-Shefter team), the rest of the film is nowhere up to the Phillips standard. Clark's direction, Branch's script, and the performances of such luminaries as Brian Keith, Rick Jason, Mala Powers and Steve Brodie, could all best be described as no more than passably routine.