Jack Slade le damné

This was a good shoot-em-up western about a boy who was traumatized around the age of 10 by witnessing his father being murdered. He took the name Jack Slade and became a criminal, but never murdered anyone - sort of a likeable bad guy. He became one of the fastest guns in the west. This film had one of my favorite bad guys in it, Lee Van Cleef. This man just looks evil. He gave one of my favorite one liners in all of filmdom, "that's fast enough". You'll have to see the film to get that one in context, which is not a bad idea. Go see it.

In this grim western the prologue involving Sammy Ogg is essential in that it keeps our sympathy with hero/protagonist Mark Stevens playing the title role of Jack Slade. Ogg plays a child version of himself and he sees his father just gunned down in cold blood during a stagecoach holdup when he protested the outlaw slapping his young son. Kindly stage driver Harry Shannon takes him in but can't cure him of his anger. Ogg grows up to be Mark Stevens a man with a fast gun and a nasty disposition.

Paul Langton hires Stevens to maintain law and order on the stagecoach line plagued by outlaws. The meanest of them is Barton MacLane who plays one of the nastiest parts I ever saw him in a career filled with nasty villains. Even the love of a good woman Dorothy Malone can't turn Stevens into a settled member of society in the changing west.

Elements of High Noon and Robert Taylor's Billy The Kid are present in the plot of Jack Slade. Stevens who was now reduced to working for Allied Artists from his glory days of starring roles for 20th Century Fox gives one of his best screen performances. Jack Slade is one western definitely not geared to the Saturday matinée kid's crowd.

This is a deep, dark, western about a man who tries to fight the devils in his psyche as a gunfighter and a man who wants to settle down with a wife in a small town.....Mark Stevens gives a solid performance as Slade, a man who grew up with violence and lives with it on a near daily basis.....Slade as a kid accidentally kills a man and lives with the demons of the mans death.....as a man growing up he lives with a man who was a stagecoach driver and became his mentor....trying to go straight he takes over the running of a stagecoach line in the west and has to make his mark...the stagecoach line has a problem with stolen horses depleting it ranks....Slade goes after the gang stealing the horses and blows away several bad guys...the killing keeps going on as Slade becomes a target for every gunslinger in and around the town....Barton McClane a staple as a bad guy in those old black and white westerns plays Slade's nemesis.... Mclane swears to kill Slade and in the end in a saloon with his partner holding a gun on Slade tries to humiliate and belittle Slade.....his partner holds a gun while Slades is on the bar...Slade's wife enters through a side door and shoots down McLane's sidekick while Slade blows away McClane. Again, this a deep, dark western with Mark Stevens giving a very solid performance as Slade...a man who looks greasy and dirty throughout the whole film....sort of goes with his personna.....for one thing Stevens is not the most handsome guy around who could have played this role, maybe Kirk Douglas or Robert Mitchum...In fact Mitchum played a very, very similar role to this film in "Man with the Gun" a 1955 oater about a dark, sinister sheriff blowing everyone away who gets in his way. Both films remarkably similar.....Dorothy Malone is a real beauty in this film as Jan Sterling was in "Man with the Gun".......both women much younger in those 1950 days....Both Stevens and Mitchum both shot down laying on the ground in the final scenes in both films.... This is a western that will not disappoint for a 1950s B film.

While watching this on TV the thought came to be that this is a neo-realist American Western. Then I realized it was made at the height of the Italian neo-realist craze. This movie is worth seeing. There is great chemistry between Slade and his woman, Dorothy Malone.

It's pretty good for what it is, but in telling the tale of Slade, a hired killer for the stagecoach, the story slides too easily into sentimentality and easy ways to show things. It does have the essential theme, that Slade's humanity is lost in his profession, and this theme is effectively explored. Van Cleef shows up for a minute; fans of his showboating bravura acting style are bound to be disappointed.