The most reprehensible commercial video game released has to be the Atari 2600 release Custer’s Revenge. Despite the primitive graphics, it is still easy to tell the player controls an aroused man who tries to get across the screen to force himself on a Native American woman tied to a post. Some reviewers of the game choose to overlook the rape aspect. As for myself, I was reminded of the game while watching 1959’s Last Train from Gun Hill, as Earl Holliman defends his violation and murder of a woman because, in his words, “she was just a squaw.”
Ziva Rodann was that woman. She and her son (Lars Henderson) has been returning from a visit to the reservation when Holliman and Brian G. Hutton start harassing them. Rodann strikes Holliman with a whip, leaving a scar on his cheek that will seal his fate later. Henderson rides off on Holiman’s horse while Hutton are assaulting his mother. I’m grateful this movie was from an era when there had to be a great deal of restraint, as just the sounds of that attack gutted me. Perhaps the scene is even more effective because of what we don’t see.
That was local Marshal Kirk Douglas’s wife and son. The saddle on the horse his son rode off on reveals an association to wealthy rancher Anthony Quinn. These two are best friends going a long way back. Quinn even saved Douglas’s life once, though the details are never revealed to us. That will make it all the more difficult when Douglas comes to arrest Holliman, not aware at first he is going to apprehend his oldest friend’s son.
Quinn rules the town of Gun Hill with an iron fist. The locals aren’t very friendly to Douglas. He says to a group of men, “Maybe I’m talking to the wrong people”, and one replies, “We’re the only kind of people this town’s got.” He asks of a bartender (Val Averry) if there are any men in town who aren’t afraid of Quinn and he says, sure, the graveyard’s full of them. Even the sheriff (Walter Sande) is completely useless and knows it. I wondered why the man even bothers to go into the police station. Douglas rightly calls him out as a coward and Sande tells him that, in 40 years, “the weeds will grow just as pretty on my grave as on yours.”
The only sympathetic ear in town belongs to Carolyn Jones. She is returning to Quinn after leaving the hospital where she was for ten days, recovering from a severe beating he administered. Something I found interesting about her character is there are no doubts she is a woman of experience. As she tells a man in the saloon who says she looks lonely, “I haven’t been lonesome since I was 12 years old.”
She and everybody else in town will eventually be watching closely as Quinn and his goons keep a stakeout on the hotel where Douglas has Holliman handcuffed to a brass bed. With snipers on the rooftops, it seems unlikely the Marshal will be able to get his prisoner onto that last train out of town for the day. As the day grows later, and the sky grows darker, the tension keeps building.
This is a very suspenseful film, leading up to a jaw-dropping climatic scene which may be slowest pursuit I have seen in a movie and one of the most unnerving. We’re talking the kind of torturous slow-burning tension like the trucks grinding up steep mountain roads as they haul nitroglycerin in The Wages of Fear.
There are many extremely solid performances here, but it really is a showcase for Douglas. An actor who tends to chew the scenery with vigor when given the opportunity, he dials it back admirably. Largely, he keeps a smoldering anger simmering under the surface, with only occasional flashes of hostility.
This is also a movie that looks great. The VistaVision compositions of sprawling Western vistas are frequently beautiful.
If there is a weak aspect of the film, it is the score. This is a very serious, adult Western, yet the energetic score seems to think it is accompanying a lively, adventurous romp.
Last Train from Gun Hill is directed by John Sturges, who also gave us The Great Escape and Bad Day at Black Rock. There are many similarities between the latter and this picture, and those who enjoy one are highly recommended to check out the other. What is interesting about both is not just that they take place in a hostile town in the west, but each has a classic story that could have been staged in any number of places and in any number of eras.
Dir: John Sturgess
Starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Carolyn Jones, Earl Holliman
Watched on Paramount Presents blu-ray