I rather feel the original "review" on the database misses the point of this dark film. The notion that the community is best served by a rigid, inflexible determination to enforce the letter of the law under all circumstances is indeed the view espoused by the film's main character (played with consummate skill by Burt Lancaster) but the message of the film is surely to point out the limitations of such a view.
Towards the end of the film the Marshall is offered another vision - of a life that contain more than the vendetta, the manhunt, and the inevitable killing that follows. Instead he is tempted by the possibility of a life that offers love, humanity and peace. Unable to change his spots, however, he deliberately throws all that away in a final, senseless act of violence when he shoots in the back a frightened and basically harmless man who is trying to run away - a senseless, brutal and completely unnecessary act of judicial murder. It bears a great resemblance in fact to Harry's similar cold-blooded and pointless execution of his terrorist fugitive at the end of "Harry's Game" and similarly to that, its effect is to arouse disgust at the perpetrator and to alienate our sympathies from what we had previously felt was the "right" side, and to question whether it had really been so "right" all along. The purpose, one feels, of this final killing was not because there was any need for it, but simply to demonstrate the Marshall's defiance of his critics and his determination to continue in the path he had previously followed.
To my mind the film is an intelligent critique of the whole notion of the missionary self-righteousness of this attitude that can arise among self-appointed guardians of the public good, whose original high standards and pure motives are eroded by the violence and the basic inhumanity of the methods they use until they become - as Burt Lancaster actually states in specific terms during the film - just people who are good at killing other people. Siilar themes were explored earlier in "The Searchers" (1956) and "Hang 'em High" (1968) and later in "Unforgiven" (1992) but the message was best expressed to my mind by Peter Shaffer n his play "The Royal Hunt of the Sun" where the young, idealistic but inexperienced squire, Martin, tells his master the conquistador Pizzarro how he feels that a "noble reason" can make the violence of war "glorious". Pizzarro replies: "Give me one reason that stays noble once you start hacking off limbs in its name".
