Je te vengerai mon fils

In postwar Civil War, a father and his four sons, all former Rebel soldiers, eke out a living robbing, always on the run. When three of the brothers ride into town to get water, tragedy occurs when one of them guns down a young boy who has fired at them with his cap pistol. Most of the focus is on five main characters: Bedloe Mason, his sons Gray and Wesley, John Willoughby and his wife, Nora.

Bedloe, the patriarch of the Mason clan, and his four sons were forced to leave their burned out home in Alabama after the Civil War. Bedloe's main concern is to keep his family together, so whenever the family faces trouble, they vote on what they should do. After the boy is killed, the vote is to keep on the run, leaving the trouble behind them.

Gray, the youngest Mason son, is uncomfortable with the idea of running away. After long introspection, he decides the only honorable thing to do is to return to the town, regardless of consequences. Gray's decision disturbs Wesley, the unrepentant killer who is afraid this will result in him being implicated.

After the killing, John Willoughby, father of the unfortunate youngster, loses grip with reality as he wrestles with grief and desire for revenge at any cost. Recognizing this and not wanting any further bloodshed, Nora struggles to keep her man rational and sane. For that reason she refuses to identify a wounded man John brings home as one of the Rebels she saw in town on that fateful day.

Though a "B" western, "Rebel in Town" benefits from good acting, competent direction and an intelligent, well-written script with lots of things for us to think about. Bedloe, a religious man, tries to comfort his troubled son with the thought that sometimes there is no answer so it is better just to let things be, further suggesting that since we are all the children of God, He is responsible for what we do, whether good or bad. Gray counters that he cannot consider his brother an agent for God. Such kind of writing is hardly the stuff of usual westerns.

Rebel In Town is set in the post Civil War west where the surrender at Appomattox hasn't ended conflict in the minds of some. One of those is John Payne who was a Union Army major in the war, but now has settled back on his ranch with wife Ruth Roman and son Bobby Clark. Payne feels we've got a big law and order problem with a lot of former Confederates turning outlaws to survive and is the first to volunteer for any posse to track them down.

But when the Mason family, J. Carrol Naish and his four sons come riding into town for supplies it's a recipe for trouble. When little Bobby Clark shoots at the family from behind with a cap pistol, one of the Masons turns and returns fire killing the kid instantly. The Masons beat it out of town.

The rest of Rebel In Town concerns the actions of Payne and the rest of the town in apprehending the criminals and the Mason family who are torn with what to do.

The Masons are a whole lot like the Hannesseys in The Big Country. The budget for the B western Rebel In Town is a fraction of what The Big Country was, yet William Wyler seems to have been influenced by the relationship of family patriarch Naish with the most reckless of his sons John Smith in creating the characters that Burl Ives and Chuck Connors played in The Big Country.

As for Payne, he's in his vengeance quest persona, something not seen in him since his highly rated performance in the noir classic Kansas City Confidential.

Rebel In Town is no frills B western with some nice performances from the cast. John Payne's fans will like his work here.

Hollywood made a slew of so called "B" westerns during the 1950s, mainly black and white 80 minutes jobs meant to fill a second feature at the local theatre.....when I saw the top notch actors in this film I figured it would be worth watching and it was very good....John Payne, J. Carrol Nash, John Smith, Ben Johnson and Ruth Roman round out a very solid cast.....in a lot of these so called B westerns there were a lot of films about confederate soldiers on the run rummaging and pillaging so the plot was somewhat familiar....what set the tone for this film was the slaying of a young boy who was gunned down by a rebel coward, who thought that a cap gun going off was the real thing and he turned around in an instant and shot the kid dead...what follows are real character studies of the rebel family and their self righteousness about how a member of their family killed a little boy and the intense manhunt led by John Payne, the boy's father....Ruth Roman plays a very compassionate, caring mother while grieving for her dead son and tries to instill logic and a level head into her husband Payne who starts to lose his cool nearly every moment in the film.....Strange part to the movie when one of the rebel band is rounded up by Payne and brought to his house not knowing he was one of the rebel band....questions follow and soon Payne realizes his "guest" is part of the family that killed his son....a mob scene follows as usual and soon law and order is restored....in the end Payne nails the real killer (John Smith) in a knife fight in a barn as he tries to escape town....his father, J. Carrol Nash forgives Payne in the end for his son's cowardice..... Payne is reunited with his wife who was at the breaking point with her husband's blood thirst for revenge.....a solid, very worthwhile western, considering it was made rather cheaply by a small studio Bel Air productions..but released by United Artists.....

Small scale western that holds together well despite unoriginal situations and a low budget.

Most of that can be attributed to the lean direction by the little known Werker and the competence of the players. John Payne is brooding and bitter in the lead occasionally going overboard with with the righteous indignation but by and large he does well. Ben Cooper is also solid as a conscious stricken young man but it's Ruth Roman who stands out with a well balanced performance as Nora Payne, weighted down with grief but compassionate enough to remain clear eyed and level headed while all around her are losing theirs.

Another asset of the film is the use of natural sounds to underscore scenes adding to their import without a lot of intrusive musical cues.

No prize winner but a better than average western.

Most Westerns use one of a limited number of standard plots, but it's hard to categorize this movie. Its setting -- a small frontier town -- merely serves as a background for a drama of revenge and reconciliation which could easily be recast as a Greek tragedy. Its central question certainly rises above the usual concerns of Westerns: can the sacrifice of one man's guilty son make up for the death of another man's innocent son?

Or, as J. Carroll Naish puts it in the last scene: "What the sons of some men do to the sons of others ... there's a tragedy of the world."

John Payne, (sporting a mustache), gets top billing here but his character is absent from many of the movie's key scenes. Ben Cooper actually plays the main character as his feelings of guilt over the death of an innocent boy propels most of the plot. Ruth Roman seems miscast as a frontier wife and mother. The less said about the two juvenile performers, (Bobby Clark and Mimi Gibson), the better.

There's a vivid flogging scene in the movie's second half in which J. Carroll Naish takes a whip to the back of his son, John Smith, who's tied shirtless to a tree. This may be the American cinema's only major whipping in which a father strikes his own son.