terror in a texas town

The western genre provides cinephiles with an almost endless amount of material to mine in search of auteurist tendencies. And at the height of its popularity, directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Sergio Leone offered plenty of evidence for a consistently recognizable style, tone and theme. But the studio system isn't build to support many unique visions, and Joseph H. Lewis, whose noirish thrillers Gun Crazy (1950) and The Big Combo (1955) are triumphs of style over substance, does his best to elevate the B-movie gunslinger flick Terror in a Texas Town, an otherwise clumsy western revenge story penned by none of than blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

Hired by a gluttonous businessman, McNeil, (Family Affair's Sebastian Cabot) to clear off squatters from oil rich land, has-been gunslinger Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young) makes an example of out of Swedish farmer Sven Hansen, shooting him down in hopes of scaring off the other rabble-rousers. But the arrival of the dead man's son, George Hansen (Sterling Hayden), who claims he should inherit the land, complicates both the business and personal situation to a dangerous degree.

George manages to convince the one witness to the crime, a Mexican farmer from a neighboring ranch, to come forward in hopes that Crale will be put to trial. But with the local sheriff on McNeil's payroll too, anyone who speaks up just might be saying his or her last words. That leaves George, an immigrant seaman with no hope of matching Crale's skill with a gun, to seek his own brand of justice...and his own weapon of choice.

Although the obvious protagonist of Trumbo's script (which makes some obvious McCarthy era connections) is George Hansen, a quiet and unassuming outsider who refuses to be bullied, the film revolves around the less likable but more interesting character of Johnny Crale. There is tragic nobility in Young's portrayal of this leather-clad killer who knows his days are numbered (a previous gun battle cost him his hand) and starts to question his own questionable morality. The sequence where Crale breaks the news of Sven Hansen's death to George across an empty bar table simply explodes with emotional conundrums. Does Crale truly regret his actions...or is he enjoying the anonymity of confessing to a man who doesn't know any better? The ambiguity of that five-minute scene is pure genius.

But the rest of Terror in a Texas Town is awful clumsy. The movie kicks off with a strange montage of scenes pulled from later in the film, as if the audience is being brought up to speed on a serial western rather than a stand-alone film, and the acting (outside of Young and Cabot) is amateurish at best. It all culminates in one of the most bizarre and unlikely final face-offs in the history of the western genre, which explains a good part of the film's notoriety. But that doesn't make the final product any less awkward. Lewis, as with his earlier films, inserts some eye-catching camera moves and almost Bergman-esque compositions (which makes Sterling Hayden's god-awful Swedish accent even more comical than it already is). His work behind the camera elevates this below-average oater into something enjoyable offbeat.

Arrow Films' Blu-ray release is a nice follow-up to their selection of spaghetti westerns of late and gets the same high marks for a crisp black-and-white hi-def transfer and supporting extras, including a lengthy introduction and discussion by Peter Stanfield who also provides a 15 minute "visual essay," pointing out much of Lewis' signature touches.