His raiders are broken up and Quantrill dies in an army hospital. Audie Murphy is sentenced to death, but the sentence is commuted to 20 years on the recommendation of Buster Crabbe, who led the attack on them. Crabbe winds up leading the Arizona Rangers. There the remnants Quantrill's forces have retreated, to become outlaws. The government can't figure out where they are, where they will strike, but he comes up with a plan: release Murphy, induct him into the Rangers and set him after the bad guys.
Audie Murphy had moved surely into westerns after he became the most decorated American soldier in the Second World War and had prospered. He was getting on in years, and the genre westerns were beginning to disappear. This movie was an attempt by him and director William Witney to produce something epic and mythic. It begins with a recitation of Quantrill's history, and moves in action. There are many nice touches: Murphy's conflicted position, the beautiful Indian girl played by Gloria Talbott, the importance of oaths, the stalwart Crabbe, and the savage Indians who carry their victims away like demons. It's a B western on a grand scale, and Witney was the man who ld bring it off if anyone could. Ford had abandoned the trappings of B productions four decades earlier. Witney had begun in the Bs, the youngest director around when he began, and he had reformed the genre, the fights, the stories, always constrained by short budgets and shooting schedules. Now, with a color camera and three decades of experience, could he save the traditional western?
Alas, no. The western was passing out of the mythscape of the world, gradually being replaced by the new frontier of science fiction. But he makes a good try here, and there are some lovely moments that recall when the west was the endless frontier, before civilization closed in. Now the West was a landscape in which everyone was corrupt, where the good, the bad and the ugly fought endlessly without any sense of right or wrong.
But Witney certainly gives it a shot. There are some lovely moments and good, canny work here. It's just that not enough people cared any more.
