Ride Beyond Vengeance casts Chuck Connors as a returning buffalo hunter returning to his wife after an eleven year absence. Sounds a whole lot like the plot premise for the Iliad and Connors does go through some trials just like Ulysses did.
Eleven years earlier Connors married Kathryn Hays who faked a pregnancy to get her aunt Ruth Warrick to consent to the wedding. Hays is a few steps up the social scale from Connors. Anyway he hauls out and says he'll make a fortune and return.
But like Ulysses he stays away and on his return is set upon and actually branded with a running iron. The three who do it are a pair of bottom feeding sadists Bill Bixby and Claude Akins and also Michael Rennie who's a rich man courting Hays because he and everyone else think her husband is dead.
Connors ain't dead and when he wakes up he's going to take care of business the way Ulysses took care of all of Penelope's prospective suitors.
This no frills B western has a fine supporting cast to Connors and Hays. In very telling bits are Joan Blondell as a bordello madam and Gloria Grahame as an unfaithful wife having an affair with younger Bill Bixby. It's a flashback to the Forties and Fifties when Grahame was the big screen's number one trollop.
As for Bixby and Akins the two of them are incredible studies in villainy. Akins who in his big screen career played some of the biggest low life villains ever really hits rock bottom here. He overacts outrageously, but all to good effect.
Bixby is the first one who Connors catches up with and his devolution as a human being may contain his finest big screen performance. Later on Frank Gorshin in a small bit himself gives a description of Bixby's final moments that will unnerve you for days.
Ride Beyond Vengeance is one brutal and savage western which no way would have made it in the days of those cowboy heroes for Republic. This is one western recommended highly for adults and forbidden for little kids.
