Western Union

No one ever really believed that Randolf Scott was a gun toter; he seemed too gentle for that. But the veneer of respectability he gave to his roles helped reinforce the western morality of good superceding evil. Nowhere is this poetry more evident as in Western Union [1941], directed by one of film noir's most gifted geniuses Fritz Lang, here working equally adeptly in colour. The shot of unfinished telegraph lines snaking away into twilight oblivion leaves lasting impressions.

This western prophecies the long professional relationship between producer Nat Holt and Randolf Scott which ran from 1946 and turned out cliché-westerns which weren't cliches at the time, and which, with practice improved till there was a kind of visual poetry about them. This isn't the history of Western Union, the way the western isn't the history of the old west. But it seems to relate a kind of truth, and that's what matters.