A Film Canon

This astonishing film attempts to recoup the blow to homosocial integrity leveled by High Noon, identifying the idiosyncratic family that metonymises around Sheriff John P. Chance's (John Wayne) efforts to hold a notorious criminal prisoner in a unmanned border town, with that full spectrum between pathos and bathos that remains Hawks' most distinctive signature as a director of Westerns. While this tends to preclude the sublimity of Ford's countervailing vision, it compensates by it's amenability to comic relief and sympathetic expansion, with the result that the film never feels like a chamber western, despite being almost exclusively set inside or at night. This is enhanced by the near-absence of close-ups, as well as a tactical attention to the music of silence, culminating with the melancholy, Mexican "cut-throat song" that opens up "time for a cowboy to dream", ushering in a conclusion in which the villains are strangely elided, and almost incidental, the final showdown reduced to the standoff between a house and the posse's own sympathetic architecture. The result is a collapse of age, gender and race into an eccentric, heterogeneous communion that ultimately feels as heterodox, in its own way, as High Noon; Hawks' most democratic achievement, Wayne's most tender performance, and the charismatic panorama of Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson,  Walter Brennan and Angie Dickinson.