Mon 3 Jun 2019
A Western Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: THREE HOURS TO KILL (1954).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[5] Comments
THREE HOURS TO KILL. Columbia, 1954. Dana Andrews, Donna Reed, Dianne Foster, Stephen Elliott, Laurence Hugo, Carolyn Jones, and Whit Bissell. Screenplay by Richard Alan Simmons, Roy Huggins, and Maxwell Shane, from a story by Alex Gottlieb. Directed by Alfred L. Werker.
As medium-budget Westerns go, this is one of the best. With a writing team that includes Roy Huggins and Maxwell Shane, one expects something mystery-related, and they deliver nicely here, under the able direction of Alfred Werker.
Werker is best known to mystery fans for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Fox, 1939) but in the 1950s he turned out a series of well-tuned westerns that included Devil’s Canyon, The Last Posse, and Rebel in Town, a film with violence still shocking today.
Getting back to Three/Kill though, it’s structured as a revenge tale (another theme common to the genre) as Dana Andrews, looking very much like a declining star, rides back into the town where he was lynched three years ago, looking for the owl-hoot (sigh) who framed him for murder.
What he finds is a town full of folks who’d rather forget all about him, including Donna Reed, who bore his child and is now respectably married to Richard Coogan (TV’s original Captain Video), Bartender James Westerfield, Sheriff Stephen Elliott (who played Cap Vid’s arch-enemy, Dr Pauli) gambler Laurence Hugo, and the ubiquitous Whit Bissel — all of them excellet in meaty parts..
The film itself was produced by Harry Joe Brown, who did the Budd Boetticher / Randolph Scott westerns, and he filled this one with color, action, and a cast of familiar faces from the B-Westerns, including Francis McDonald, Snub Pollard, Buddy Roosevelt and Sid Saylor.
There’s an unusual slant to this film, with Andrews the center of attention who finds himself now oddly irrelevant as he pursues his lonely justice. Rather than letting things get bogged down in talk though, Director Werker keeps the action coming, photographed in splendid b-movie Technicolor with the requisite horse-chases, fist-fights and shoot-outs one expects.
What one doesn’t expect is the surprisingly thoughtful conclusion, which I won’t reveal here except to say that it lingers in the memory long after a lot of better-known westerns have bit the cranial dust.
June 4th, 2019 at 10:04 am
In spite of all its positives — cast, story line, director — and even though its available on DVD, this is a movie that’s all but unknown — only five other external reviews on IMDb.
Also note that Donna Reed won an Oscar only the year before (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY).
June 4th, 2019 at 1:24 pm
Not a western, but set it in the depression era, shoot in black-and-white, same script, same cast, and you have a serious product.
June 4th, 2019 at 3:04 pm
Good piece on a very neglected movie, which I wrote up myself some years ago. I like the actors involved in this and the mystery elements of the story. Director Werker is underrated too and he was very good at turning out taut and trim pictures like this.
June 4th, 2019 at 8:36 pm
Very close to a Western noir despite the technicolor, and surprisingly intelligent when it could so easily have cruised on a good cast and a relatively simple revenge story.
That everyone involved seemed to care enough to do more is a tribute to them, and what could be done within a genre too often taken for granted.
June 5th, 2019 at 7:47 am
Sounds good. Thanks.