THE LAST OF THE VIKINGS. Tiberius Film, Italy, 1961. Medallion Pictures, US, 1962. Original title: L’ultimo dei Vikinghi. Also released as El último vikingo (Spain). Cameron Mitchell, Edmund Purdom, Isabelle Corey, Hélène Rémy, Andrea Aureli, Mario Feliciani. Director: Giacomo Gentilomo.

   Although I didn’t have the highest expectations when I started to watch it on DVD last night, The Last of the Vikings, is a surprisingly good “sword-and-sandal” movie. It’s not The Vikings (1958), but for what it is, namely a fairly entertaining escapist action film, it’s not all that bad.

   Directed by Giacomo Gentilomo, (Mario Bava is uncredited), this Italian Viking epic (how’s that for a sub-genre?) stars Cameron Mitchell as Harald, a Viking warrior determined to revenge the death of his father at the hands of the mad King Sveno (Edmund Purdom). Along the way, he both learns what love is, and subsequently falls in love with the beautiful Hilde (French actress-model Isabelle Corey). After numerous obstacles thrown in his path, our fearlessly determined protagonist eventually slays the sadistic Sveno and gets the girl.

   Unlike some other costumers and adventures flics from the same era, Last of the Vikings doesn’t play it light.

   Indeed, there is something very dramatic (in the Shakespearean sense) about the performances in this little-known film. Cameron Mitchell and Edmund Purdom are both very good actors, and it shows. Look in particular for the scene in which Harald (Mitchell) slays a traitor in his midst. Mitchell’s performance is nearly flawless in that moment; he just seems to be a natural actor for portraying leads in revenge dramas.

   Unfortunately, the version of the movie that I watched, a DVD released by Alpha Home Entertainment, has a visual quality that is, well, acceptable, but not much more than that. Since I don’t suppose that anyone will be restoring this movie anytime soon, that may be the best available copy for the foreseeable future.

   That’s a shame, because the actors did take their roles seriously and there is a really great – awesome, really – fight sequence at the end, one that far surpasses most, if not all, digitally manufactured CGI battle sequences.

   Who knows? Maybe there’s a 35mm copy out there somewhere, tucked away in an archive or a private collection, just begging to be watched on the big screen.

  RUFUS KING – A Variety of Weapons. Doubleday, hardcover, 1943; Popular Library #97, paperback, no date [1946].

   Ann Ledrick has become known as an excellent photographer of pets. Thus, or maybe thus, she is hired to take pictures of some pet ocelots at Black Tor, the Marlow estate accessible only by air or, with great difficulty, by horseback. Justin Marlow, fabulously wealthy, has been a recluse at Black Tor ever since his son twenty years earlier was executed for killing his pregnant bride. Marlow’s only desire in life since then has been to prove his son’s innocence.

   During that twenty years, two of the young men who were in love with Marlow’s daughter-in-law have died “accidental” deaths — one by shotgun while hunting, the other after having ingested some perhaps ptomaineous pate de fois gras that had been mailed to him. Other accidental deaths have also taken place on the estate.

   When Ledrick arrives at Black Tor, she finds that there is very little interest in her taking pictures of the cats. Instead, she discovers as Justin Marlow dies, there is another reason for her presence at the Marlow estate. It has to do with the past murder and a very present murder.

   Although not by any means scientifically knowledgeable, I believe King goofed in one area, but it’s an area that isn’t all that significant to the reader. Otherwise, King presents a brooding atmosphere skillfully and portrays Ann Ledrick as a level-headed, intelligent, charming character.

   The detective, Sgt. James Hurlstone, who arrives on horseback because of a storm, is both bright and able. That he adopts a cat at one point in the novel and takes it with him wherever he goes may make him appeal to cat fanciers until they discover the reason for this odd companionship.

Editorial Notes:   It sounds strange to me as well, but I believe this blog has reviewed more of Rufus King’s books than any other author. That it seems to have been a favorite of Bill Deeck may be part of the reason, but he’s been reviewed by others as well. King’s most recent appearance on this blog was a review by Bill of two of his books, The Case of the Constant God and The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings. Prior to that was Bill’s review of The Steps to Murder, worth pointing out since at the end of this review are links to all of the other Rufus King reviews.

  DETOUR TO DANGER. Planet Pictures, 1946. Britt Wood, John Day, Nancy Brinckman, Eddie Kane, Fred Kelsey, Si Jenks, Eddie Parker, Ashley Cowan, Bud Wolfe, Ken Terrell. Screenwriter: Alan James. Producer-directors: Harvey Parry & Richard Talmadge.

   I’m not going to kid you. This is one really bad movie, put together by a group of amateurs, I’d bet you think by looking at the credits, but you’d be wrong. Not about this being a bad movie, since it is, but the men behind it, from the producers-directors on down, all had lengthy careers in the movies. Almost all of them have long lists of movies they were involved with in some way or another, some of them up to 300 entries long, perhaps more, going back to the silent days.

   Mostly in bit roles, to be sure, or as stunt men. The leading man, John Day (John Daheim) and both directors did stunt work in loads of movies. They must have decided to put up the financing together to form Planet Pictures, which made only one other movie, Jeep Herders, also in 1946, and while they also probably went broke very quickly, they must have had a lot of fun doing so.

   The plot is nothing, and it’s poorly told. A gang of payroll robbers are forced to land their getaway plane near a summer resort spot somewhere near Big Bear Lake in southern California, where they mingle with the guests until two fishing buddies, Speedy (Britt Wood, and the funny one) and Steve (John Day, the husky clean-cut one) save the day.

   While the crime solving is inept, the romance is even worse. Things are livened up a little when a runaway excursion wagon filled with screaming girls is saved by the two heroes in their beat-up old jalopy, and a fight scene that lasts the final five minutes, much of it taking place in an another runaway truck careening its way down a narrow mountain road.

   What’s remarkable is that this movie was filmed in color. What’s even more remarkable that this movie still exists today, but only Alpha Video would believe it was worth releasing on DVD.

MICHAEL COX – The Glass of Time. W. W. Norton & Company, hardcover, October 2008; softcover, October 2009.

        “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.”

   That was Wilkie Collins’ formula for the nineteenth century thriller of the triple-decker variety, and here and in his previous Victorian thriller, The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox more than follows Collins’ advice. There are perhaps fewer laughs, though, in this dark tale of revenge across time and one young woman’s mysterious “Great Task.”

   Her name is Esperanza Alice Gorst, and she has recently arrived at Evenhood where she will enter service as maid to the rather liberal Miss Emily Carteret 26th Baroness of Transor and her sons, Perseus and Randolph Duport.

   Esperanza is no ladies maid, though. She was raised by her guardian Madame in Mansion de l’Orme in France, and only two months earlier she had learned it was her role in something called the Great Task to befriend and grow close to Lady Transor. She does not know why, only that her past is leading her here and her future turns on her success.

   And Lady Transor is something in herself:

   Esperanza’s work would seem cut out for her, for how could a mere maid seduce such a woman of beauty and wealth. Unknown to Esperanza, it will be much easier than she knows, because she has special gifts and advantages she is ignorant of as yet. She cannot know all the intricacies of the Great Task yet, lest she fail.

   Esperanza will rise from maid to companion to daughter in-law to something far higher through the twists and turns, dangers, insanity, and mysteries of this modern triple-decker, with allies and enemies both known and unknown, sympathies, confusion, passion, and cool intellect all spun masterfully out by Cox in an effectively Victorian voice that never-the-less is an easy and pleasant read. There is little to forgive in this novel or his previous book The Meaning of Night, and much to applaud.

   The literary thriller, of which this is a good example, follows two chief tracks, the contemporary version with ties to the past, usually in the form of a valuable object or artifact, The Book of Four; and the historical version, The Name of the Rose.

   This falls in the latter category and manages to evoke not only Wilkie Collins, J. Sheridan LeFanu, and Mary Elizabeth Brandon, but also a touch of Alexandre Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo, since at heart The Glass of Time is about old injustices, mysterious figures with new identities, lost fortunes, young love, and implacable revenge. Don’t think this will be too dated though. Cox is a masterful story teller and a gifted writer.

   Esperanza is no delicate fainting flower. Despite her innocence she is smart, tough, and ruthless when need be. This is not Little Nell. She proves not only Lady Transor’s equal, but her nemesis, though no one is simply good or evil, nothing simply black and white. This isn’t Rebecca unless there had been two Rebecca’s battling for Manderlay; if it resembles any works from the past it would perhaps be one of the Joseph Shearing novels like Moss Rose, So Evil My Love, or Blanche Fury.

   The Meaning of Night was a hard act to follow, being a variation on Kind Hearts and Coronets, but Cox succeeds admirably with a book that manages to be similar enough to reward those who loved the earlier novel and totally different in its protagonist and her plight.

   I’m deliberately not giving too much away because there are twists and turns and surprises enough to come. If I’ve made it sound stately or dull it is not. It moves, it’s a compulsive page turner, it breathes and lives, the characters are genuine people from heroine to the slightest character, and the setting is splendidly evoked even down to a final revelation on virtually the last page that will likely come as a complete surprise to most readers.

   You won’t find the best of the mystery genre in the mystery section of bookstores today, but among the mainstream novels by talented and canny writers such as Michael Cox. No one does the literary pastiche better or more artfully. This and his first book would be completely at home beside The Woman in White, Uncle Silas, or The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

THE BANDITS OF CORSICA. United Artists, 1953. Richard Greene, Paula Raymond, Raymond Burr, Dona Drake, Raymond Greenleaf, Lee Van Cleef. Director: Ray Nazarro.

   The story is kind of silly, the costumes aren’t the most spectacular, and at least one member of the cast seems as if she would have benefited tremendously from acting lessons. Even so, The Bandits of Corsica, a costumer/swashbuckler starring Richard Greene is nevertheless a fairly entertaining quasi-Western romp through Alexander Dumas’s fictionalized version of Corsican history.

   Greene, in a dual role, portrays Siamese twin brothers separated at birth. Mario Franchi, the “good one,” is a wealthy Corsican with a beautiful girl by his side. The other brother, Lucien, is a shell of a man long thought dead. But he’s not dead, of course. He’s living with amnesia under the name Carlos. But that’s not all. He’s camping out with Gypsies and, through an invisible psychic connection, can feel pain that his twin brother experiences. Did I mention that deep down he hates Mario?

   As far as the plot, it’s not all that elaborate. The two brothers reunite to fight the evil local tyrant, Baron Cesare Jonatto (Raymond Burr) and his nephew (Lee Van Cleef). Watching these two fine character actors portray would-be Napoleons is just a fun cinematic experience. In many ways, they’re more interesting to watch than is Greene in either of his two roles.

   All told, The Bandits of Corsica is a slightly better than average 1950s adventure film. It’s not the greatest film out there for its genre, but the last half hour has a distinct Gothic atmosphere, is quite well filmed, and contains just enough action to keep the viewer’s attention.

RICHARD HUGO – Death and the Good Life. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1981. Avon, paperback, 1982.

   Hugo is a noted American poet, and this is his first mystery. His hero is a soft-hearted ex-cop from Seattle, and his name is Al Barnes. Since quitting his job in the city, he’s taken a deputy sheriff’s position in the small town of Plains, Montana.

   That’s right. Montana. Not Georgia. The Pacific Northwest is rapidly becoming a hotbed of detective-story activity. You can add another pretty good one to the list.

   The first murder is an axe-killing, and so’s the second, but it doesn’t seem to fit the pattern. The trail leads Barnes back to Oregon, and once there, deep into the past. It takes a gut feeling for the truth to work a scent almost twenty years old, and that Barnes has. Memories are not always pleasant ones, but some of the ones he dredges up are particularly nasty ones.

   The prose is right, and Barnes’ instincts for the job are never far from wrong, but the story still doesn’t click the way it’s supposed to. Strangely enough, it’s the rhythm, the beat, that’s off. This is essentially a private eye story, and it’s a crucial factor. This one just misses.

Rating:   B minus.

Note:   This was Richard Hugo’s only mystery novel. He died of leukemia in 1982, at the relatively young age of 58.

   Usually this column deals with work by others: novels, stories, movies, whatever. This month, for starters anyway, it deals with me, or more precisely my latest book. Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law is a hefty tome that brings together various pieces I’ve written over the past quarter century on law-related fiction, films and TV.

   I admit up front that a few of the book’s chapters, for example the one on “Telejuriscinema, Frontier Style,” have nothing to do with the detective-crime genre, unless you include in that genre all sorts of TV Western series from The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid to Kung Fu.

   But many of the pre-Production Code movies that get picked apart in “When Celluloid Lawyers Started to Speak” belong to the genre in one way or another — even if I eccentrically insist on calling them juriscinema — and there are long individual chapters on Melville Davisson Post, Arthur Train and Erle Stanley Gardner, the lawyer storytellers who dominated what I eccentrically insist on calling jurisfiction from the tail end of the 19th century until Gardner’s death in 1970.

   There’s also a chapter on the three versions of the Cape Fear story, beginning with John D. MacDonald’s 1958 novel The Executioners and proceeding through the two vastly different movies called Cape Fear: the 1962 picture with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, and Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake with Nick Nolte and Robert DeNiro.

   Also included are my takes on the fascinating if almost completely unknown court-martial film Man in the Middle (1964), with Mitchum playing a sort of Philip Marlowe in khaki, and on the equally obscure The Penalty Phase (1986), one of the last films directed by Tony Richardson, with Peter Strauss starring as a liberal judge faced with the nightmare of having to release a psychopath who raped and murdered seventeen young girls.

   The publisher of this volume is Perfect Crime Books, which also put out my Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection (2013), and I see on the Web that it’s been submitted for Edgar consideration to MWA.

   Did anyone notice? In the previous paragraph I referred to Arthur Train (1875-1945) as a lawyer storyteller but not as an author of crime or detective stories. Why? Because Train himself insisted that he didn’t write in that genre and had little interest in it. But many of his stories about attorney Ephraim Tutt and his entourage have to do with trials for murder or other serious crimes, and at least a few of them seem to me, and not just to me, to deserve a place in the genre we love.

   The earliest of these is “The Hand Is Quicker Than the Eye,” the fifth tale in the Mr. Tutt series, originally published in the Saturday Evening Post for August 30, 1919, and collected in Tutt and Mr. Tutt (Scribner, 1920). Ephraim also operates as both lawyer and sleuth in a number of other tales first published in the Post and later included in one or another Scribner collection, for example “The Acid Test” (June 12, 1926; Page Mr. Tutt, 1926) and “The King’s Whiskers” (December 30, 1939; Mr. Tutt Comes Home, 1941).

   My own favorite among the Mr. Tutt stories that include significant detection is “With His Boots On” (September 12, 1942; Mr. Tutt Finds a Way, 1945). That’s the one I chose a number of years ago when Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine editor Cathleen Jordan asked me to select and introduce a story about Ephraim for its Mystery Classic reprint series.

   Ms. Jordan thought the tale was seriously flawed — although she died before she could explain her reasons to me — and instead we settled on “‘And Lesser Breeds Without the Law’,” which struck me as only marginally crime fiction. This is one of a very few tales in the series that the Saturday Evening Post rejected. Why? In the 1920s another magazine owned by the same publisher had serialized a Zane Grey novel that was not only sympathetic to what were then called American Indians but ended with the Navajo hero marrying the white woman he loved.

   So many benighted readers were so outraged that the publisher adopted a new policy: NO MORE POSITIVELY PORTRAYED REDSKINS! EVER!!! That policy was still in force when Train submitted his story, which was set on New Mexico’s Cocas Pueblo reservation and anticipates the treatment of Native Americans that we tend to identify with Tony Hillerman. The tale appeared as an original in the Train collection Mr. Tutt Comes Home (1941) and never came out in a magazine until AHMM for February 2002.

   Not quite that long ago, when I was commissioned to write an essay on the poetry-crime fiction interface for the Poetry Foundation website, I decided that this column was the ideal place for material (of which there was a bunch) that wound up on the electronic cutting room floor.

   In recent years I haven’t run across any items that would justify reviving the old Poetry Corner feature, but now I have. Remember the world-famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)? One of his classic early poems was “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a work consisting of twelve lines divided into three stanzas, written in 1888 and first published two years later.

      Rex Stout, who needs no introduction here, considered Yeats “the greatest poet of the century.” (I assume he meant the 20th century.) In August 1943, a few years after Yeats’ death, Stout wrote “Booby Trap,” fifth of the Nero Wolfe novelets, which appeared in American Magazine for August 1944 and was included in the Farrar & Rinehart collection Not Quite Dead Enough not long afterwards.

   It’s one of the very few tales in the saga where Wolfe is working without pay as a civilian consultant to Army Intelligence and Archie Goodwin has become a major in the same branch of service. The hijacking of industrial trade secrets shared with the military for war purposes leads to the murder of a captain and a colonel, the latter taken out by a powerful hand grenade right in G2’s New York headquarters.

   The tale like so many of Stout’s is hopelessly unfair to the reader, with Wolfe fingering the culprit by the lazy old expedient of setting a trap and seeing who springs it, but for sheer readability it still holds up nicely after almost 75 years.

   All well and good, you may be saying, but where’s Yeats? Good question! In Chapter 4 Archie finds a sheet of paper containing a typed copy of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which for no earthly reason whatsoever is printed in the text. Its only plot significance is that both Wolfe and Archie immediately notice that it was typed on the same typewriter that produced an anonymous letter earlier in the story.

   Sharing that information with the reader didn’t require printing a line of Yeats’ poem, let alone the complete work. We know from John McAleer’s Rex Stout: A Biography (1977) — which misleadingly states that Stout quoted only the first “three stanzas” —that Yeats’ U.S. publisher raised a stink when the story appeared in print. Here’s how Stout explained to his Farrar & Rinehart editor.

   â€œI am an ass. When I was writing ‘Booby Trap,’ out in the country, I phoned somebody at Macmillan to ask if it would all right to quote that poem … and was told that it would be. But I made no record of the conversation, I don’t know the date that it took place, and I don’t know whom I talked to. Beat that for carelessness if you can, and let me know which jail I go to.”

   McAleer doesn’t tell us how the matter was resolved, but most likely Stout had to pay Macmillan some money. The poem must still have been protected by copyright in 1944, but it’s been in the public domain for decades and can be found online in a few seconds. On YouTube you can even hear Yeats reading it.

   The city of Ferguson is about 15 miles and 20 minutes’ drive from my home in St. Louis’ Central West End. While I was working on this column, Ferguson exploded. Hundreds of thousands of words have already been written about the events and I see no reason to add to them except to quote a passage from Ellery Queen’s non-series novel The Glass Village (1954) where the protagonist reflects “that man was a chaos without rhyme or reason; that he blundered about like a maddened animal in the delicate balance of the world, smashing and disrupting, eager only for his own destruction.”

   If Thanksgiving week was a sad time for reason and common sense, Thanksgiving Day was especially sad for our genre. P.D. James, one of the last great English detective novelists, died peacefully at her Oxford home. She was 94 and still thinking about writing one more novel. Peace be upon her.

YELLOW CARGO. Grand National Pictures, 1936. Later released as Sinful Cargo. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, Vince Barnett, Jack La Rue, Claudia Dell, Vance Carroll. Story, screenplay & director: Crane Wilbur.

   Pretty much a minor leaguer in the overall scheme of things, but this was the first of four crime and espionage movies featuring the two leading stars Conrad Nagel and Eleanor Hunt in a series of “G-Man” pictures, the other three being Navy Spy, The Gold Racket, and Bank Alarm, all from 1937.

   Conrad Nagel plays Alan O’Connor in all four, while his companion in crime solving is Bobbie Reynolds, played by Eleanor Hunt, about whom I will have more to say later. O’Connor works for immigration office in Yellow Cargo, sent to the west coast to breakup a gang who has been smuggling illegal immigrants from China into, while Bobbie Reynolds is a brash young newspaper reporter covering the movie industry.

   Their paths meet when they both learn that a small time movie studio is using a make-believe film to conduct their business, replacing movie extras dressed in Chinese garb by the men from China they are smuggling in.

   The movie is played as much for laughs and light entertainment rather than a serious crime drama, with balding Vince Barnett as the dimmest (and clumsiest) news photographer ever to try to take a picture with an old accordion box camera.

   You have to give the actors credit. They take their roles seriously, even if the story (lame) and production values (practically nil) are far beneath their ability. Stalwart leading man Nagel’s career lasted until the 1960s in both TV and the movies, but unfortunately Eleanor Hunt made only one more film after this series ran dry. Her large expressive eyes reminded me of Kay Francis, but with a much brassier demeanor. To add to the comparison, she also has a hint of a lisp.

   As a former chorus girl, Eleanor Hunt also had the legs to show for it, at least in one short scene in which her skirt came up above her knees. I don’t know why I noticed that, but I did.

   In spite of its various and sundry flaws and shortcomings, I enjoyed this less than 60 minute programmer, and I think I’ll look to see if the other three in the series can be found.

THE HANGING TREE. Warner Brothers, 1959. Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, Karl Malden, George C. Scott, Karl Swenson, John Dierkes, Virginia Gregg, with Ben Piazza as Rune. Screenplay: Wendell Mayes & Halstead Welles, based on the novella by Dorothy Johnson. Music by Max Steiner. Title song sung by Marty Robbins. Directed by Delmer Daves and (uncredited) Karl Malden.

   The Hanging Tree was Gary Cooper’s last western other than the documentary The Real West, and appropriately it is one of the best of his career, and one of the best of the 1950‘s, the golden age of the Hollywood Western. It’s based on the novella by Dorothy Johnson (A Man Called Horse, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and directed by Delmer Daves (3:10 to Yuma, Jubal), or it was supposed to be directed by Daves until he fell ill and Gary Cooper, whose company was also producing the film, asked Karl Malden to take the helm. It proved a remarkable collaboration and the start of a friendship and mutual admiration society that lasted until Cooper’s death.

   Like most good westerns the story is simple, Doctor Joe Frail follows the 1873 Montana Gold Trail to a small mining community, mostly tents and mud, where he sets up practice. When a boy, Rune (Ben Piazza) is shot for stealing from a sluice Frail saves him and makes him his bondsman, a virtual slave, blackmailing him with the bullet that proves he was the sluice thief.

   It’s a rough little town not improved by glad-handing backstabbing miner Frenchy (Karl Malden) who knows Doc Frail from another mining camp, knows how fast he is, and about the fire Frail may have set that burned his wife and her lover alive.

   This is a very adult adult western.

   When Frail wins a gold claim from gambler Society Red (John Dierkes) all seems set, and no one much listens to Grubb (George C. Scott) a fanatic faith healer who hates Frail and knows his history. There is only one element left, and that arrives when the stagecoach is held up and the horses panic. Everyone dies but a young woman who suffers severe wounds and exposure, Elizabeth Mahler (Maria Schell), a Swiss immigrant come west with her now dead father.

   Frenchy finds her and feels a proprietary interest in her, as well as undressing her with every lewd look. Frenchy has other bad habits than backstabbing. But Doc takes on her care with young Rune, and while Doc seems a hard man there are signs he is more than that. Frankly Rune just can’t read him and neither can Elizabeth: a man with secrets like he carries becomes remote, even his name is false. He took the name Frail because he figured all men were frail and he was the frailest.

   When Elizabeth is well she tires of Frail’s bossiness, especially when he tells her he is sending her back to Switzerland because he can’t live near her. She runs away, Rune rebels, and Doc secretly backs them through store owner Tom Flaunce (Karl Swenson), the only decent man in this little mud hole Sodom of the west despite his shrewish wife, Edna (Virginia Gregg).

   Backed by Doc Elizabeth and Rune team with Frenchy who knows gold digging though he isn’t very good at it, and though they find nothing Doc keeps backing them whenever they need money.

   When a rainstorm fells a tree on their claim they find the glory hole, a vein of nuggets in the roots of the tree and beneath. Now they are rich and rush to town to celebrate.

   But Frenchy hasn’t forgotten Elizabeth and when he tries to rape her, Doc arrives just in time and kills him. No, that’s an understatement, because in one of the most brutal scenes in any American western of its era, Cooper empties his gun into the fleeing Frenchy, who dies at the edge of a cliff, and Doc then kicks his corpse over.

   The grim Frail as he coolly walks down the pleading running Frenchy putting bullet after bullet in him is a scene you won’t soon forget. Perhaps only Cooper’s brutal beating of Jack Lord in Man of the West and throwing Cameron Mitchell into the fire in Garden of Evil come anywhere near it. And, I’m little ashamed to admit it, it is a very satisfying scene as well, Malden is always a very killable bad guy.

   Grubb and Society Red and a group of drunken miners drag Frail to the hanging tree to lynch him, and have the rope on his neck and Grubb at the horse’s reins when Elizabeth and Rune arrive and buy his life at the cost of their claim. As the drunken miners battle over the claim Rune frees Frail and Elizabeth turns to leave but Frail calls her back and kneels in the buckboard to embrace her. Fade to the Marty Robbins theme. He literally found his love at the hanging tree.

   The Hanging Tree has more than enough virtues and might be Cooper’s best if not for High Noon. Frail is a complex character who is never just a hero, just a good man, just misunderstood. Life and fate have bred a rattlesnake mean streak in him and it is clear he fears it though he fights it more successfully than he knows.

   It is not until he comes clean that the viewer knows for certain he did not set than fatal fire. Malden, fresh off his Oscar, is quite good as Frenchy, but as a director he is a revelation. This film is as well directed as any major western of the era, a worthy rival for Ford, Mann, Hawks, Daves, or any of the other iconic Western directors. IMDb says he finished the film, but Daves became sick early, and Malden directed the bulk of the film

   Ben Piazza as Rune is a little lost in this cast of veterans, but not badly lost, and Schell is fine in a tough no nonsense non-glamorous role that is both physically and emotionally demanding. And then there is that New York actor making his Hollywood debut on screen, George C. Scott. He has only a little time on screen, but he makes the most of every scene as the fanatic, cowardly, venal, murderous Grubb. If he had never done anything else you would remember him from this. I did for years, though I didn’t really know who he was or connect the star of television’s East Side, West Side with the part.

   But like almost any film he is in this is Gary Cooper’s film and there is never a moment you don’t know it, whether he is on screen or not. I recall seeing this on the big screen (it was the debut of Technirama) and being bowled over by Cooper. He’s still impressive on the small screen though in this one, Malden seems to have staged it to shoot Cooper from a lower angle making him seem even taller and more commanding than he was to begin with.

   The Max Steiner score is fine, and surprisingly, considering the title, the Marty Robbins theme song turns out to be one of the best of the era and one of the best western themes ever. “To really live/ You must almost die …” proves haunting if you may not want to think about it too much and “I found my love at the hanging tree” is a tough lyric to pull off even in a western song but Robbins succeeds.

   Brian Garfield suggested they should have stopped making westerns when Cooper died and this should have been the last of its kind. I don’t know that I agree with him, but his point is well taken. In many ways this is the last and one of the best of its breed. Screen westerns never really reached this height again; in my opinion, they were never this good again, not at this level. Whatever Cooper brought to the western, went with him.

   If you have never seen this one then find it. It shows up on TCM now once in a while and is available from the Warner’s Archives to own or watch on line if you are a subscriber. You can also listen to the Marty Robbins song and see the titles and end scene on YouTube.

   This is quite simply one of the best westerns of the 1950‘s and one of Gary Cooper’s best westerns, which makes it one of the best westerns ever made.