drystyx

As usual, Asylum wastes a bunch of resources to worship Hitler's blond Aryan woman ideology.

Demaree, Bevilaqcua, Cooney, and Hanstock bend over bakcwards to contrive ways to kill any "gypsy" looking woman that they can kill. This is all that Hanstock ever does, and now he finds three fellow Nazis to help him.

The excuse now is a volcano, and people isolated in Pompeii.

Everything else is an excuse to waste special effects and resources to kill any black haired woman that they can kill. This isn't a spoiler, because Asylum is noted for being a haven for the modern day Hitler worshipers.

It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't waste so much on hate like this. No man could possibly like this. A world without beautiful women? No, this is a chick flick, and maybe a flick for the losers who are still angry over the brunettes who jilted them at the dance.

It got old in the seventies, and it's still old. The trouble is that everyone in power is endowing their Nazi youth to keep the same boring junk going.

Director Sholem and writer Dorso give us a very heartwarming story set in the West, giving us many different credible characters, all very motivated.

Howard Duff is excellently cast as an "everyman" in a situation where he happens upon a young man who is about to be dragged by horse through the cholla, which often results in death.

He helps the young man, and the young man returns the favor, giving him a keepsake gold coin that the young man's older brother will recognize, and the young man's brother helps out the "everyman".

What erupts is a lot of action and a lot of revelations about the characters.

I really don't want to spoil the story by explaining the other characters, but the supporting characters make this a great story, and Duff makes it an excellent story.

In rating Westerns, it's natural to expect more from the Westerns of the fifties with their more identifiable, credible, and interesting characters in an era of "credible motivations in incredible circumstances'".

That's obviously due to a time when people dealt more with harsh realities of survival. Modern Westerns (beginning with the pathetic Leone spaghetti garbage) were geared for bubble boys who felt that they would act the same way as the stereotypical Hollywood "demigods" that the hacks shoved down our throats sometime about after 1965.

Here, we have a case where the two leads are not nearly as recognizable as the villain and the lawman. Walter Coy, of course, is the most recognizable, as the good brother in "The Searchers".

This is a tale of revenge, and of people who wisely tell the hero not to seek revenge. Many of the characters are surprising for Hollywood, but the fifties did have more surprising and more iconoclastic stories.

Birch gets the best role as the lawman here, and kind of steals the show, mostly because it is written for him to steal it, and he does a terrific job. He's the opposite of the usual Hollywood lawman character, a very iconoclastic character who is not the usual "outlaw turned lawman".

That's a risk that few directors or producers would take after 1965, thanks to a more "bubble boy" audience.

If there is a weakness in the story, it's the lack of development of the outlaw brothers. Even Coy doesn't get to do a lot other than be a villain. Not that they aren't credible. They are like real villains. It's just that they aren't given a lot to do other than their evil acts.

A good film. Not the usual Hollywood story.