Convict Stage

It's hard to believe that this film dates from 1965 as it had the look and style of a film made at least ten years earlier. No great performances but not any bad ones either. The plot was a bit of a stretch to believe but two bullets sensibly fired early on would have made the film very short. Worth watching for curiosity value to see what must be the very last 1950s style cowboy film. I slightly recognised the lead character but all the rest were new to me. Nicely filmed in glorious black and white, in 1965!, so probably one of the last non colour films made, except for those deliberately done in non colour for added effect, The Elephant Man for example.

Very unusual, so interesting little western, far better for me than most of bigger budget productions, so sure of their cast. It was made by lesley Selander, one of the most prolific western provider of the industry, with also Ray Nazarro. This one is from the early sixties, a period where western topics could be very offbeat. The story of a vengeance and shown not in a classical and predictable way. The directing is unfortunately flat and without surprise. Don Red Barry is at his place in this role. This not STAGECOACH as you can easily guess, but for a B western it remains, I repeat, more interesting than most of them, where you have to watch one hundred of movies to find only one or two worth seeing.

Two venomous outlaw brothers are on "Top of the World, ma" for their Ma Jarrett type Hanna Landy, the scene-stealer of CONVICT STAGE, a b-Western with a tight, contained story to fit the tight, contained setting of a ghost town where all the characters wind up, including a tough old sheriff along with a gunfighter in Harry Lauter, whose sister gets violently murdered (in an eerily mundane fashion) during a prologue that ignites a revenge plot-line that doesn't completely own the programmer as often happens...

Only the revenge-seeker's wife is consumed by it.. by hating it... threatening to leave if he kills cold-blooded siblings Joe Patridge and Eric Matthews who, given more time and a bigger budget, would have made a classic antagonist duo...

But there's still some cool sporadic action in several dusty locales as the brothers are taken by that titular coach to/towards jail, and that's where faithfully resilient evil mom Hanna Landy comes in (as her phantom gang prepares elsewhere), going undercover under sheriff Don 'Red' Barry's nose as one of several supposedly mundane passengers, also including the ingenue/wife and a few other gun-toting cowboys, who wind up in a rushed shoot-em-up finale...

But only because so much essential time's spent building the characters and motivations since in CONVICT STAGE, everyone's got something either hidden up their sleeve or bleeding right outside it.

Colour had been an established feature of the western genre since the early fifties, so 'Convict West' represents an unusual departure for being in black & white at so late a date. The Utah landscapes are deliberately bleak, the composition is very horizontal, the interiors bare and it betrays its sixties provenance in the frequent use of zooms.

One of the final films of veteran director Lesley Selander, scripted by classic noir scenarist Daniel Mainwaring and one of the very few films in which Harry Lauter was allowed to play a hero. Woman are in the thick of it: one of the first casualties being a young female stagecoach passenger shot in the back while fleeing by a trigger-happy hoodlum, while Hanna Landy cuts a formidable figure as a European matriarch who's quick on the trigger.

Some time ago, stage-coach-robbing brothers Joe Partridge and Eric Matthews killed Harry Lauter's sister. He has been chasing them since. Marshall Red Barry has captured them and is taking them to prison by stage, and Lauter means to exact vengeance, though his wife tells him she won't be there when he returns. Others are there, too. Hannah Hertelendy, the robbers' mother is on the stage, and a drummer with a very large pistol...

The American B western had vanished under the assault of television. In 1965, the TV western was not in great shape and there was still a market for the darker western. 20th Century-Fox could always use one to offer for double or triple features, and if you could keep the budget down, you could give some professionals jobs and make yourself a few dollars, just like in the old days of the cinematic west. And that is what this was: classic, simple story, competent actors (mostly; I think Jodi Mitchell as Barry's wife offers poor line readings), some decent direction by Lesley Selander and the wide-open camerawork that was often the best part of the old B Western.

In many ways, it looks like a large and gracefully shot, serious episode of a TV western. It is distinguished by Gordon Avil's black-and-white cinematography of the badlands near Kanab, Utah -- John Ford Country, but contrary to legend, a lot of people shot westerns there. Lynn Reynolds was the first in 1924, a decade and a half before Ford first went there for DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK. Avil was born in Philadelphia in 1899. His career as a cinematographer began in 1929. By 1930, he had worked on King Vidor's BILLY THE KID. In 1931, it was THE CHAMP, again for Vidor. Then his screen credits vanished for 16 years. He returned to the camera in B movies and television work. After camerawork on a third of the episodes of HOGAN'S HEROES, he retired. He died of a heart attack in the Barbados in 1970.