Terror in a Texas Town

When people discuss the Western in the 50s, the richest decade of the genre, they invariably cite Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, THE SEARCHERS or RIO BRAVO . Only the specialised, however, will single out Joseph H. Lewis. A LAWLESS STREET electrifies a banal story with inventive technique. TERROR, though, is something else. I have watched hundreds of Westerns, and I can safely say that this is the most remarkable pre-Peckinpah/Leone effort I've seen. It may not be as rich as the above-mentioned, but its formal daring is unparalleled.

Like Mann, Lewis came to the Manichean world of the Western from film noir, a genre defined by its moral ambiguity. The opening sequence is the most astonishing of any Western (except THE WILD BUNCH, of course), and cleverly complicates everything that follows. It starts with the shoot-out, an innovative device, but one of the combatants carries a large pike. His opponent, face unseen, taunts him. The scene is highly charged, even if we don't know why.

The result of this sequence is cut, and we get the opening credits, featuring an elliptical series of scenes, some lyrically pastoral, others brutally violent, none making any narrative sense because we don't know the story yet. The film proper hurtles us into a violent arson attack. So in the first five minutes, the viewer is assaulted by sensation and violence. There are none of the reassuring signifiers of the traditional Western - noble music (the score here is as bizarre, inventive and parodic as any Morricone spaghetti); John Wayne or Henry Fonda above the title; contextually explanatory intertitles. We have no idea what is going on, we are left staggered, breathless, excited, reeling.

What follows is an explanation of these events. But the unforgettable effect lingers, and colours what seems to be a traditional Western story - big business trying to muscle in on small farmers. The most interesting figure is not the hero, Sterling Hayden, a gentle man forced by circumstance to find savage violence in himself (and saddled with a ridiculous, faltering Swedish accent, but little character), but the villain. In many ways he is the archetypal baddie - dressed in black, a gun for hire, snarling, brutal with women. But he is also a complex psychological portrait - a once great shot, now a cripple, lush and impotent. The familiar story is subverted to become the tragedy of an evil man. The film's surface detective element - who killed Hayden's father - is subsumed thematically by the investigation into this fascinating character (we know early on who killed him anyway).

Stylistically, Lewis turns the Western, traditionally about open spaces, new frontiers, hope, escape, into a bitter male melodrama about entrapment, failure and death. The stark, clear visuals are as beautiful and aesthetically exciting as THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, another morbid masterpiece. The disturbing editing, and exagerrated compositions seem to belong more to Nouvelle Vague deconstructions than a Hollywood Western. Almost as awesome as GUN CRAZY, this is provocative proof that Lewis was a great director.

A bizarre, intense, frightening unsung masterpiece filled with original and compelling characters. It's hard to tell what the main interest is: the Swedish hero; the leather-clad Bogie-inspired villain; the brave young Mexican; the callous, quick-tongued fatcat. The cinematography is stylized yet subtle. The dialogue is trenchant. Then, of course, there is the unnerving harpoon showdown. There is no movie quite like this one, folks. A must-see.

In El Dorado John Wayne has occasion to remark to Ed Asner that since he doesn't carry a gun himself he hires it done. And then the Duke went on to make some remarks about the quality of his help.

But the reverse of the coin is when who you hire is too good for you to argue with. That was the problem that Sebastian Cabot has with Ned Young, a brooding killer who he hires to intimidate some farmers to get off land that unbeknownst to them has oil. It was at the end of the frontier days and the great oil discoveries that were to make Texas and oil synonymous were just being discovered.

One guy who won't be pushed is a Swedish farmer who Young kills. His son played by Sterling Hayden comes to town asking questions. Like Hayden in real life, the son is a seaman who's strange in that western environment. He carries no gun, but only a harpoon from his seafaring days.

By this time Hayden was ready to leave Hollywood for Tahiti and was just trying to earn enough money to sail there with his kids. He'd been a friendly witness at the House Un American Activities Committee It must have been a bit strained on the set because the screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten. Trumbo was still writing under pseudonyms though.

Hayden walks through his role, the real acting here is done by Ned Young and Sebastian Cabot. Both of them are a pair of hateful people, Cabot the greedy capitalist and Young the stone killer.

Western fans won't be disappointed however, especially at the final confrontation at the end.

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.

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.