Terreur au Texas

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.

There's a lot more to this little Western than the cheap thrills the title might suggest. The film itself may have been made in black and white, but the off-beat story is shot through with shades of moral grey. Indeed, I'm not sure that it would be entirely baseless to describe it as an implicit indictment of US society.

This picture uses familiar Western stereotypes - the corrupt sheriff, the land-greedy tycoon, the sinister hired gun - in a depiction that subtly undercuts much of the entire genre. I don't think it's too far-fetched to see the long shadow of McCarthy over the townspeople who allow themselves to be cowed and driven off one at a time, only to turn at last as a mob not on the man who bribed their silence, but on the outsider employed as a tool to do his dirty work.

(Having just read the IMDB entry for this film and discovered that the scriptwriter was himself blacklisted by the McCarthy regime, I'm now almost certain I was not imagining this!)

The whole story is framed by that final confrontation and the flashbacks (?flash-forwards?) that follow under the opening titles. After all, it's not every Western that features a man walking the length of Main Street to face down his father's killer... with a harpoon. This one *opens* with that image!

But as we catch up with the flash-back scenes in real-time we soon realise that things are not as they seem. This is no standard Western, there are no stand-up gunfights and no galloping horses; the only quick-draw we see is performed under duress as a humiliating party-trick. Virtue is not rewarded and those who make a stand on principle only suffer thereby. The hired killer is an aging gunman whose trade has lost him the use of his good right hand; the dogged hero is no cowboy or plains drifter but a seaman from a Swedish whaler, and the script makes it very clear just what value he can place on American justice.

Inexorably, driven by the sinister jaunty little tune of the theme music, the story winds on until we reach again that final face-down - and now the close-ups make sense, and they are not what we thought they were. That man with the moustache is not the sheriff; that blonde is not the hero's girl; the crowd is not spilling out of a saloon.

And it is not any longer, for me at least, the clear-cut question of good and evil the genre has led us to expect. When it is all over - when the shots are called and the dice are down - the crowd pours past the Swede without a backward glance. Society doesn't want to know; doesn't want to face its own complicity. It wants a scapegoat to sacrifice, and for life to go on.

Morally, this film is very far from black and white. If it is a B-movie, then it is by far more unsettling than the vast majority of cheap and cheerful productions made in that budget. I cannot imagine what its intended audience must have made of it. Am I the only viewer to find myself drawn as much to the cold-blooded, isolated 'villain' as to the nominal hero?

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.

When oil is discovered on the properties of peaceful homesteaders, fat-cat Sebastian Cabot sends his one-handed gunman to terrorize them into leaving. When stubborn Swedish whaler Sterling Hayden's father is killed by them, he takes on the bad guys with only a harpoon and the truth!

The premise is a bit familiar but the story is artfully told with great acting by all involved. Hayden plays an offbeat, interesting, and unconventional western hero and Cabot is a wonderfully sleazy villain. However, Academy Award winning screenwriter Nedrick Young gives the film's best performance as Cabot's vile hired killer.

Entertaining from start to finish, this is a really compelling low-budget movie that really knows what buttons to push, especially as Hayden tries to get his neighbors to break their fearful code of silence.

The final showdown, glimpsed in the opening scene, is both memorable and exciting

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.