Un paso al patíbulo

Director Salkow I know nothing about but on the strength of this flick, perhaps I need not bother find out more. The finished B product is uneven, you keep listening to witness accounts after the fact, a courtroom situation that seems too modern for those times, and you just do not know what to believe. The final chase happens immediately after Hayden arrives on the scene with a marshall dogging him for fear of murdering the supposed culprit, who is so pathetically afraid that he provides the single most unusual touch to an otherwise run of the mill film.

Salkow extracts an unusually pedestrian performance from Hayden, who has the thankless task of confirming in court that a dying man blamed his son for the killing of stagecoach rider Fielding (who appears only at the moment of impact). I have to say that Hayden seems too wooden in his delivery of the indicting statement, and looks oddly ambivalent after that.

While not extracting better from an actor of Hayden's talent is criminal, I readily forgive Salkow for failing to score a meaningful portrayal with a substandard actress like Constance Ford. In truth, I cannot recall a single outstanding performance in the film. The culprit does not deserve remembering for any particularly successful characterization, only for being so useless at his job and pathetic in his effort to flee - there was something unintentionally comic about that entire sequence.

One unresolved mystery in this movie that still haunts me: what happened to the money in the Chinese fellow's box? Who stole it and for what purpose? Could it be the culprit when he realized that the cash was not in the stagecoach anymore?

Be that as it might, the whole McCoy hinges on a freshly minted silver dollar. As the saying goes, the dollar makes the world go round!

Cinematography: nothing to write home about.

Big plus: 73' long (but I still fell asleep during the courtroom scene).