Un piede nell'inferno

As the satanic title suggests 'One Foot in Hell' is considerably darker than your average oater. Marking the mounting ambition of former small part actor Aaron Spelling who joined forces with veteran noir screenwriter Sidney Boehm to script one of the growing genre of westerns depicting the malaise of the lost generation of Confederate veterans aimlessly wandering the land after the Civil War.

As Alan Ladd's career as classic Hollywood's Quiet Dangerous One came to its conclusion he played a guy with a massive chip on his shoulder due to the death his wife (at which we actually see him cry) who gathers together a gang of roughnecks to wreak collective vengeance on the community he holds responsible by (SLIGHT SPOILERS COMING:) robbing the local bank with a lot of violence.

The most amazing thing about this movie was Alan Ladd. And not in a good way. Probably because of his alcoholism Ladd was almost unrecognizable. Was this Shane?? Although he was only 47 he looked like a 65 year old out of shape grandpa. His acting seemed to have diminished as much as his looks. This film would have been a lot better with someone like Audie Murphy in the lead role. Sadly as Shane is my all time favorite movie and Ladds character my all time favorite character this movie was very hard for me to watch.

Alan Ladd wasn't much of an actor. If you don't believe me just take a look at his mediocre performance in the very mediocre western "One Foot in Hell" which was directed by the little known James B Clark and also featured Don Murray, (terrible), and Dan O'Herlihy (slightly less terrible), in prominent roles. The only thing it has going for it is a plot that differs somewhat from other run-of-the-mill westerns. (It's more akin to a gangster picture). Ladd is the sheriff who plans to take revenge on the town that let his pregnant wife die, by robbing the bank. Handsomely shot in Cinemascope by William C Mellor it passes a couple of hours painlessly enough but you're not likely to remember it ten minutes after seeing it.

Alan Ladd's last western is this strange little item that did not get much play back in 1960, confined to second place on double bills. He should have done this one earlier when he was a much bigger box office name.

Ladd plays a settler traveling west and his wife comes down with some prairie malady. Going off to the nearest town he gets a prescription for a $1.87 worth of medicine. But then he runs afoul of some of the town louts and gets delayed long enough so that his wife sickens and dies.

The town fathers feel real sorry for him. In fact they feel so bad that they offer him the job of deputy sheriff. But when the sheriff dies and Ladd becomes sheriff it's the first step in an elaborate plan for revenge on the town. He hates each and every citizen of this place because of the death of wife Rachel Stephens.

Ladd puts together a gang in secret to rob the town bank at a proper moment when it's bulging with cash. Among others in his scheme are drunken cowboy Don Murray and working girl Dolores Michaels. Murray's part is very similar to the one he had the year before with James Cagney in Shake Hands With The Devil. In fact if you've seen that film, you know what happens in One Foot In Hell.

What could have been a great comeback role for Ladd goes for naught. I'm not sure it was his drinking at the time. More like it was wife Sue Carol who at this point was mismanaging his career. And face it, his day had past.

But next to what he was about to do over in Italy in Duel of the Champions, One Foot In Hell comes out like Stagecoach. It's not a bad film, as good as any of the B westerns that Audie Murphy was doing at this time. Still had he been 10 years younger and the film had been distributed differently, say with Paramount's studio power back in the day when he was their biggest star, One Foot In Hell could have been a classic.

As it is, it's not bad viewing. Note the script was by an up and coming television giant, Aaron Spelling.

Definitely agree with the many IMDBers below who feel that the most notable thing, by far, about this psychological western is Alan Ladd's descent into darkness. Pretty sure I've never seen Ladd be this rotten. That it works is tribute to Ladd's skill as an actor, a talent often buried beneath a ton of bad to mediocre movies. Every so often, as in "Shane", "Blue Dahlia" or "Glass Key", it would rise to the surface and it's interesting that those three films also feature Ladd in a shadier hue than usual, although nothing compared to his portrayal of vengeance driven evil here. With his ridiculous derby hat and dead voice and deader eyes his character is truly creepy.

Dragging the film down is a clunky script by Aaron Spelling (yes, THAT Aaron Spelling) and Sydney Boehm that asks you to buy that a town can turn from moral corruption to redemption on a dime, based on a scolding from Larry Gates' saintly doc. And the love scenes between Don Murray and Dolores Michaels start at cloying and work their way down from there. Also, in a sure sign of bad writing, potentially interesting subsidiary characters, like Dan O'Herlihy's articulate killer and Barry Coe's sadistic killer, remain potential rather than fully developed. There is a scene that suggests these two have a shared past but, unless I missed something, we never find out what it is. (That's called a story hole, in case you're wondering).

Ladd sure lingers in the mind, though. Enough to give this film a B minus.