Sturm über Texas

This strange, surreal film is unique among westerns of the era. While it contains most of the standard western clichés, every cliché has a twist. The music is bizarre and often doesn't seem to fit, but that just adds to the offbeat feel. The acting is odd but perfectly suited to the film. Hayden's take on a Swedish accent and speech patterns bounces from realistic to annoying to non-existent, but his performance is excellent, as is Cabot's. The story is riddled with moral dilemmas that give it surprising depth. Don't be fooled into thinking this is just another B western. This movie has a quality that is difficult to describe. Strangely great.

Joseph H. Lewis was something of a B movie king, with his best directorial efforts coming via Westerns and film noir. After this Sterling Hayden starrer he signed off from Hollywood for good, as a legacy it's difficult to say if it's a fitting point of reference to Lewis and his talents, or entirely apt for his career? It's an often quirky, even bizarre, picture that manages through its surreal like tendencies to detract from its formulaic Western plot.

Set in Prairie City, Texas, the tale revolves around George Hanson (Hayden), a Swedish whaler who after 19 years away, returns to Prairie to find his father has been murdered. As he delves deeper with a staunch undaunted determination, he finds that the law is corrupt and a horrible land baron called McNeil (Sebastian Cabot), aided by gunslinger for hire Johnny Crale (Ned Young), is behind his fathers death. It appears there is oil in the land and McNeil is using force to buy up the land at ridiculously cheap prices. But if he thought George was going to be forgiving? Or going to be easily frightened? Well he and Crale are in for some big shocks.

Shot in stark black and white, Lewis' film throws up the always interesting conflict between homespun virtue and greedy evil. There's compelling villains and some nicely drawn characterisations for the decent citizens of the town, such as those who are on the periphery of the protagonists struggle (note Victor Millan's poor Mexican farmer and Carol Kelly's downbeat girlfriend of Crale).

What of Hayden, though? It's a fascinating performance, where saddled with the task of trying to do a Swedish accent, and wearing a suit a size too short for him, it's difficult to know if he is in tune with the off-kilter nature of the film, or he's just on robotic auto- pilot while Lewis chuckles to himself off camera. Either way Hayden gives us a character to root for with our every breath. Hanson is a bastion of good and well meaning, we ache for him to outdo the lobster eating land baron and the metal clawed outlaw.

There's some controversy in the tid-bids here. The script was credited to Ben Perry, but actually was written by Dalton Trumbo who was blacklisted. Hayden, although not blacklisted, appeared before the House of Un-American Activities Committee and simultaneously admitted past communist affiliations and named names. Lewis was not involved in the unsavoury chapter but was a close friend of Ned Young, who was blacklisted for taking the fifth, but whose impact on the film was to not only be in it, but to also be instrumental in getting Lewis to direct it. Boy was that an interesting time in American history.

Stylish, odd and certainly different, Terror In A Texas Town has enough about it to make it worthy of a night in. And it gets better on repeat viewings once you buy into the kookiness. 7.5/10

While the eye-catching poster promises "Iron Hooked Fury!" and pitting a harpoon against a six-gun, the curiously forgotten B-movie western Terror in a Texas Town, directed by Joseph H. Lewis, is a positively downbeat little movie. Starting with a handsome, square- jawed hero walking into battle with a clad-in-black gunslinger, it appears at first glance that we are on familiar ground. But the film then flashes back, and all the western tropes we had been expecting are subtly subverted, similar in many ways to Nicholas Ray's groundbreaking masterpiece Johnny Guitar four years previous. The screenwriter is credited as Ben Perry - a name you'll likely be unfamiliar with. Yet this was in fact a front for Dalton Trumbo, the great Oscar-winning writer who was then under scrutiny from Senator McCarthy and blacklisted from Hollywood. With this knowledge, the oddness of Terror in a Texas Town suddenly makes sense.

In the - you guessed it - small Texas town of Prairie City, the hard-working farmers earning little from their land are struggling to fight off the advances of the unscrupulous land baron McNeil (Sebastian Cabot), who is using his wealth and influence to buy up the whole area for reasons not immediately clear. Some of the townsfolk are playing hard-ball, refusing to give their homes and livelihood to a man they never see. So McNeil brings in tough-as- nails gunslinger Johnny Crale (an outstanding Nedrick Young), a broken career-criminal who is happy to caress his pistol whenever a deal doesn't go his way. He murders Swede Sven Hansen (Ted Stanhope) when he refuses to sign a contract. A day later, his sailor son George (Sterling Hayden) arrives to greet the father he hasn't seen in over a decade, only the learn of his murder and that the land left to him is now the property of a greedy businessman.

It quickly becomes clear that the hero-versus-villain showdown the opening scene promised us will be nothing like we expected. The dashing American hero is in fact an immigrant without the skills of a quick-draw or the wits to take on McNeil on his own, and the black leather-donning Crale may just be in the midst of developing a conscience after years of killing and the loss of his gun hand. What makes Terror in a Texas Town so interesting is the way it merely hints at the two central characters' personalities and past, leaving these could-be archetypes as intriguing enigmas. Trumbo makes a point of highlighting the ranchers' ignorance of McNeil's Machiavellian role in the events, choosing instead to focus their hatred on the muscle. It isn't difficult to imagine that Trumbo's exile and unforgivable treatment at the hands of his own country didn't influence this apparently off-the-conveyor-belt B-picture. It has been unfairly forgotten by the decades, but Terror in a Texas Town is ripe for re-discovery as one of the strangest and most compelling westerns American has ever produced.

This is the last film from western and crime movie specialist, Lewis. It`s the complete opposite of what you would expect from the title, a slow and character-driven film, beautifully shot in high contrast black and white. Cabot is especially good as a complex and troubled baddie. The final shootout comes as a complete surprise (I won`t tell you.) Recommended to Western fans.

When oil is discovered on the properties of peaceful homesteaders, fat-cat Sebastian Cabot sends his one-handed gunman to terrorize them into leaving. When stubborn Swedish whaler Sterling Hayden's father is killed by them, he takes on the bad guys with only a harpoon and the truth!

The premise is a bit familiar but the story is artfully told with great acting by all involved. Hayden plays an offbeat, interesting, and unconventional western hero and Cabot is a wonderfully sleazy villain. However, Academy Award winning screenwriter Nedrick Young gives the film's best performance as Cabot's vile hired killer.

Entertaining from start to finish, this is a really compelling low-budget movie that really knows what buttons to push, especially as Hayden tries to get his neighbors to break their fearful code of silence.

The final showdown, glimpsed in the opening scene, is both memorable and exciting