La capture

As a big fan of Miss Wright ,the great character actress of Wyler's ,Walsh's or Hitchcock's classics , I was looking forward to watching this movie ;but as far as she's concerned ,I was disappointed :her part is underwritten , her screen presence is about half of Lew Ayres's ; her character is cardboard ,cast in the widowed-woman-with-child mold and predictable to a fault (although her evolution is preposterous: first she treats Ayres as a slave , then overnight she falls into his arms)

On the other hand ,the male part is much more interesting : a man consumed with remorse ,who tries to find the truth and makes another faux pas ; a man who does not know where he stands anymore who confesses to a priest : the movie is a long flashback ,and can be considered ,from that point of view ,as a moderately successful film.

The Capture is a neat little modern western where Lew Ayres in the space of the 90 minute running time learns what it's like to be the hunter and the hunted. The film was written and produced by Niven Busch, screenwriter and husband of co-star Teresa Wright.

A tired, bedraggled, Lew Ayres staggers into the mission of Padre Victor Jory and tells him he's hunting by the police in Mexico where this story takes place. He explains to Jory just how this happened.

A year earlier Ayres was the foreman in a Mexican oilfield with mixed Yankee and native crew and his payroll is robbed. Ayres deduces that the posse organized is doing it wrong and he decides to become an unofficial peacemaker and bring in the bandit himself. And he finds such a suspect where he thinks he should be in the person of Edwin Rand. Rand is wounded in The Capture, but later dies after police interrogation.

Ayres quits Bolsa Grande Oil and breaks off his engagement to Jacqueline White. Circumstances bring him to the small ranch of Rand's widow Teresa Wright and their boy Jimmy Hunt.

I won't say any more other than the plot takes a turn from the Graham Greene novel and film, This Gun For Hire. As for the personal relations between Ayres and Wright, the plot elements from the future John Wayne classic Hondo are used.

The film was shot on location and was an independent production released by RKO Pictures. Ayres, Wright, and the rest of the cast give good accounts of themselves. And the ending is rather unusual for 1950 in that you really don't know what everyone's fate will be in the end as the film ends somewhat abruptly. Abrupt, but still effective.

The Capture tries mightily but in the end it suffers from a meandering script which is too full of plot devices and contrivances. The result is shocking as it was directed by the great John Sturges, who directed some of the best action pictures ever made, including "The Magnificent Seven". It is a picaresque type of a story which might be called " the Adventures of a Guilt-Ridden Oilman". Lew Ayres in the lead role bounces from place to place, falling in love with the wife of a man he has killed while searching for the real payroll thief. As he is on the lam in the midst of his guilt trip, he is eventually discovered and must hit the road again. Eventually he ends up in the same straits as the man he has killed, even incurring an identical injury as the dead man.....

Sorry. I dozed off trying to recount the drab, preposterous proceedings. At best, it is a curiosity which is about 20 minutes too long and stretches the credulity of the viewer to the breaking point. Lew Ayres was good and Teresa Wright was excellent, but even so a question arises; Did they do drugs while writing scripts in the 40's?

This is an interesting drama that features a good leading performance by Lew Ayres and a story that combines action and a little psychology. The pace is uneven, particularly in the middle of the movie, and this keeps it from being better. But both the early sequences and the climactic chain of events work pretty well.

Ayres plays a former oil man who once captured a suspected criminal, and then felt responsible when the man died in custody. He starts to get involved with the dead man's widow, even as he is haunted by uncertainty over whether he had done the right thing. It sets up a number of possibilities, and it is given an added air of fateful inevitability by the technique of having Ayres's character tell most of the story, in flashback style, to a priest.

After a solid start, things bog down for a while in the middle, although Ayres and Teresa Wright do their best to keep it watchable. Eventually, though, it gets back on track, and the last few scenes tie things together and bring the story to a tense conclusion.

Wounded fugitive Lew Ayres (as Lin Vanner) finds refuge in the company of convenient priest Victor Jory (as Father Gomez); in the latter's home, he relates, via flashback storytelling, his unfortunate story. Mainly, Mr. Ayres' tale concerns his stay as ranch hand for new widow Teresa Wright (as Ellen Tevlin) and her son, Jimmy Hunt (as Mike). Despite revealing he was responsible for her husband's death (after a payroll heist) Ayres wins Ms. Wright's hand in marriage.

Most enjoyable during Ayres' sleuthing, after he weds Wright; during this time, there is a neatly directed John Sturges hanging. Still, this is a more unsatisfying than not film; it doesn't ever find a balance between psychological swerving talk, and occasional action. "Cisco Kid" Duncan Renaldo (as Carlos) can be spotted among the supporting players.