En el límite del desierto

I read the reviews here and wonder if anyone has a different interpretation. This movie is about the dark side of human nature where everyone is for themselves. I'm not sure if that message will catch but it will in another light if you consider more recent films such as the Dark Knight movies or the Man With No Name trilogy. In many movies, there are no real heroes. So even the women in this movie don't have emotional reaction when something tragic happens to a close person. The hero Tex Kirby comes back for revenge of his brother, or is it? Paca who loses her husband finds an cold unexpected way to get revenge. The Indian maids who leave Hannah (Yvonne De Carlo) and the ranch are neutral characters but still, they do what's best in their interest. So at the end, it is easy for Hannah to have no love lost and be willing to leave with the hero.

The wild west was an arena where you had to watch your back. The setting was a wild 1842 Oregon where there are no rules. It was lawless and you defended yourself. Even those you think you can trust, can you really trust them? The rancher who makes the rules, Gerald Montgomery makes very harsh rules. Take a woman like she is property if she has no husband. One evil character shoots his father in the back. No one cries in this movie. Violence, lawlessness and war dull the emotions. We know that where even young children exposed to war get emotionally insensitive to death. It is unusually violent for a movie in the mid-50s depicting rape, murder (of relatives), treachery and lawlessness. It seems really that the Yakima Indians are the only ones with a code, law or ethics.

A question is what degrees of evil and selfishness are there?

If you watch the movie with this in mind, you can see the message. But most people won't see it that way, but will get confused by the mindless violence and unemotional characters. In this way, it's an unusual minor masterpiece.

The evil characters are definitely fun. Overall, supporting roles are well-acted but the leads are very average. The script does not lead to a clearer message and a viewer could get lost in its meaninglessness. Other than the message and supporting actors, the movie is fairly average. So an average rating might be 5-6 for me, but the supporting actors and dark message are fascinating and bump it to a 7 even 7.5. If you don't understand it, it's a 5 or 6.

From the deep, dark depths of Universal's back catalogue comes Raw Edge, a truly bizarre western. It's really awful.

The movie is set in the 'lawless' 1842 Oregon, where if a woman is widowed, they are up for grabs to whoever 'claims' her first. The land baron who set this rule has a beautiful wife (played by Yvonne DeCarlo) who all the men covet. When she gets assaulted, an innocent man is lynched and his wife is widowed. It's gonna take tough gunslinger Tex Kirby (Rory Calhoun) to avenge his brother and sort out the greatly misogynistic tyrant.

This movie's biggest failing is the story which is pretty ridiculous. The premise is unbelievable, even for the Oregon of the Wild West. The plot itself wasn't particularly engaging either, the revenge story had been done dozens of times before and much better than this. It's also not very exciting and there are barely any fights that were fun to watch.

Rory Calhoun is fine in the movie, he says his lines and does bring a sort of stoic personality to his character. Same goes for Yvonne DeCarlo, she's fine. Neville Brand plays an over the top villain who's out to get DeCarlo, he was entertaining enough.

Overall, this film is really bizarre and barely entertaining enough to warrant a watch. The acting is serviceable but the plot is all kinds of strange. But I think it could be fun for the sheer weirdness of it.

Raw Edge is quite a fascinating little (a brief 75 minutes long) western given it was made in 1956 and that the overarching theme being examined in the film is the place and status of women in the "Wild West"; a theme which in the light of ongoing contemporary events, still resonates strongly in the second decade of the 21st century.

I have no idea whether there is any historical basis at all to the fictional events depicted in Raw Edge. Unlike one or two other reviewers at this site however, I'd respectfully suggest that the sort of story we see, set in a frontier settlement with no organised legal. judicial or religious institutions, is not unimaginable. Historically men are drawn to civilisation's peripheries in far more dominant numbers than women.

Besides its very intriguing story, the film looks great in technicolour and makes very good use of its location photography. Rory Calhoun and Yvonne De Carlo are fine in the lead roles, displaying an innate chemistry occurring between their characters, in spite of their frequent antagonistic clashes. Good to see the Native Americans are treated in a very sympathetic light too, with the status of their female characters contrasting markedly with those of the whites.

The main bone of contention that does need to be raised is the frequent anachronistic aspects employed in moulding this fringe story into an action western setting. Therefore though set in 1842 Oregon, the film in its fashions, weapons and even buildings (Montgomery's palatial lodge) seems to be occurring 30 - 40 years later in time. A small price to pay in my opinion for an engrossing oater.

This edgy and off-beat western has plenty of seething resentment amongst its characters (and there are lots of them: vengeful gunslinger, baddie, baddie's dumb henchmen, local gambler, baddie's wife, baddies girlfriend...) but isn't too believable. Some good action scenes but only average over all. (5

It all starts in Oregon, where Herbert Ruddey is in charge. Women are chattel, and when his chattel, Mara Corday, says she was attacked, the man gets strung up. Up rides the dead man's brother, Rory Calhoun, who wrangles with all the men who want to rape Yvonne De Carlo, and to gain his revenge on Rudley.

It's the first feature directed by John Sherwood, and a clear indicator of why he would direct only two more. The movie seems to be put together in bits and pieces, shot entirely on sets -- although it was not -- and populated with the good-looking but mediocre at best performers which Universal kept foisting on the audiences in the 1950s between Sirk soapers. Everyone is brightly lit, showing off their spotless attire and perfectly coifed heads after they've ridden miles on the dusty trail, and while the script is far from the standard patterns of the B westerns of a decade earlier, it's all surface tension, with occasional musical stings from the library to try to raise the emotional level.

I suppose it was cheap enough that Universal showed a profit on it, or at least broke even, but I'd rather look at a Buster Crabbe B. At least he's having a good time watching Al St. John's antics, and not the dour and stupid characters here.