A Man Alone

_**“Shut up, Wesley!”**_ In the Old West, a drifting gunman (Ray Milland) finds himself in a Southwest town wrongly accused of a crime. He hides out in the basement of a young woman whose father is invalided upstairs (Mary Murphy and Ward Bond). Can he escape before being lynched by a vengeful mob? Raymond Burr, Lee Van Cleef and Alan Hale Jr. are also on hand. "A Man Alone" (1955) is the first of five films directed by Milland. It mixes the brutal realities of the Old West with some quality mood. While mostly a town-bound Western (and often in the Sheriff’s residence), there’s also some spectacular photography of the Southwest (listed below). Meanwhile Milland comes across as a James Stewart lookalike. If you can roll with a couple of contrivances, the story is good with interesting explorations of morality. For instance, is dishonest gain acceptable as long as no one dies? Even if it can be justified, what if innocent people wind up dead? How long can a generally good person keep up the lie and live with their conscience? The movie runs 1 hour, 36 minutes, and was shot at Republic Studios in Los Angeles with location work done at Snow Canyon outside St. George, Utah. Other locations cited are Arizona (Paiute Wilderness Area & Colorado City) and New Mexico. GRADE: B

Ray Milland directed himself and built quite well on a reliable cast with this story of a gunslinger who rued the day he tried to do something good. Having lost his horse, “Steele“ discovers the wreckage of an ambushed stagecoach as he walks in search of civilisation. Thing is, though, when he borrows a horse and reports what he has found to the local sheriff (Ward Bond) has quickly finds himself chief suspect. Things don’t get any better when he encounters the manipulative and greedy “Stanley” (Raymond Burr) who owns the town and has plans of his own that don’t include “Steele. When the lawman is then shot in the back, his days look well and truly numbered but for the intervention of that man’s daughter “Nadine” (Mary Murphy) who shelters him whilst her father recuperates. Becoming more convinced "Steele" is a decent man, and taking a shine to him too, it is her who begins to realise the extent of the corruption in the town - but what can they do against an angry, stirred-up, population bent on vengeance? Although the story is hardly original, Milland holds this together capably with Bond, Burr and a more substantial contribution from Murphy as her more pivotal role presents us with the moral of the story. This is another of these westerns that showcases the emergence, kicking and screaming, of genteel law and order from the ashes of it's more violent past and though there is the odd shoot-out, this is more a thinking man’s film about doing the right thing.