The Pinkertons send bounty hunter Randolph Scott after three train robbers whom no one can identify. He soon comes to a small town. When word of who he is gets around, a lot of people get nervous. That's part of his plan, because he doesn't know whom he's looking for.
Before he made the seven Ranown westerns with Budd Boetticher, Randolph Scot made six in a row with Andre De Toth. These emphasized the moral ambiguity of the West, where no one cared who or what you had been as long as no one came looking for you. This movie has Scott as the man who comes looking, and he stirs up a lot of people with a lot of dirty pasts, in whom he has not the slightest interest, including a couple who pull guns on him. Scott is, of course, the thorough professional, single-minded on the job at hand.
DP Edwin DuPar, out of the studios, is more interested in shooting people than scenery, and does so in Eastmancolor which seems to have faded to brown. The script is good, although not as spare of the ones that Burt Kennedy would write for the Ranowns; the humorous bits here seem forced. I do admire how the standard Shaky-A tropes are just implied in favor of actual stuff happening. That keeps this to a spare 79 minutes, and I didn't miss a thing.
By this time, having Randolph Scott meant you didn't need to spend on other actors, so easily recognized performers are Marie Windsor and Ernest Borgnine -- with plenty of "I know that guy" performers. There are also plenty of the bit players who seemed to show up in every western, like Chet Brandenberg (445 screen appearances) and William H. O'Brien (648 times before the motion picture and television cameras). O'Brien entered the movies in 1918, and appeared in everything from Von Stroheim extravaganzas to Stan Laurel shorts. He retired from the screen in 1971, and died ten years later at the age of 89.
