Terror in a Texas Town (1958) | Blu-ray Review
Revered as one of the premiere B film directors from the late 1930s to 1950s, Joseph H. Lewis is known to Western and noir aficionados for a handful of iconic titles. Most prominent in his filmography is 1950’s Gun Crazy, which features an infamous thrill crazy, kill crazy couple played by Peggie Cummins (as one of noir’s most vicious femme fatales) and John Dall. Arrow Academy resurrects his dark and glorious swan song, 1958’s Terror in a Texas Town, starring Sterling Hayden as a Swedish whale hunter come to wreak vengeance for the murder of his papa in this property related melodrama which unites Lewis’ two favored genres.
Penned by blacklisted actor Nedrick Young (who memorably stars as the film’s rock hearted villain and also penned the Oscar winning The Defiant Ones the same year), the script was re-tooled by Dalton Trumbo under the pseudonym Ben Perry. Lewis, who was keen on retiring, saw making the film as an opportunity to work with blacklisted writers without fear of backlash (he would spend the next ten years or so working in television, finishing in 1966 with several episodes of “The Big Valley”). Wickedly entertaining and with swagger to spare, this microcosm of capitalistic cruelty is sharply observed and distinctly pessimistic.
McNeil (Sebastian Cabot) is an entrepreneur who has built himself up enough to take the reins of rural Texas town Prairie City. Aware of the oil bubbling just beneath the land of the despotic handful of farmers who make up the town, McNeil is keen to buy everything up for himself. Having met staunch resistance with his proposals, McNeil hires an old cohort, dangerous gunslinger Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young) to strong-arm the men out of their land. Crale, whose ego as an aging, outmoded loophole has been wounded a few too many times, murders a defiant Swedish immigrant. But when the dead man’s brutish son George Hansen (Sterling Hayden), a former whaler, comes to pay his Pa a visit, McNeil’s scheming is upset by a ruthless scramble for control.
Considering the feathers High Noon (1952) ruffled earlier the same decade for its metaphorical critique on blacklisting, Terror in a Texas Town plays like the sawed off shotgun version of similar “American” themes. Sticking out as sore as his wooden harpoon, Hayden’s halting Swedish accent, though distracting, underlines the troubled history of otherness in the evolution of the United States and how it played into the accumulation of wealth.
Trumbo and Young compound this with the Victor Millan’s Mexican farmer, a racial other treated to a double dose of demeaning treatment. Witness to the murder of his friend, Jose Mirada and family aren’t seen as important enough by Crale and McNeil to set an example for the other white townsfolk. When asked about how long his family has been on the land, Mirada replies they’ve always been there, their ownership and livelihood unrecognized, invisible.
Trumbo imbues each of these figures with defining baggage, reflected in a number of perversely written exchanges. Molly, the blonde beauty played by Carol Kelly, inexplicably stays with rotten-to-the-core Crale despite her apparent empathy for others. Introduced as a nymphomaniacally inclined good time gal, she tells Hayden she stays with Crale because not only is he the only type of man who would be with her, but also the only person more morally bankrupt than herself. As the town’s baddie, Sebastian Cabot is a corpulent vision of white privilege and undaunted excess, but it’s really the complex performance from Ned Young as Crale, a gunman who’s past his sell-by date, which really ratchets up the tension. Described as “death walking around in the shape of a man,” Cabot’s greedy hotelier remarks off-the-cuff, “Death – it’s in his blood.”
Disc Review:
Arrow Academy presents Terror with a brand new 2K restoration from original film elements in high-definition 1.85:1 with uncompressed mono 1.0 PCM audio. Picture and audio are stellar in this presentation, which includes a clutch of bonus features, including an introduction by Peter Stanfield, author of Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail and Horse Opera: The Strange History of the Singing Cowboy.
A Visual Analysis:
Peter Stanfield provide a fourteen minute visual analysis, which examines several objects in frames which are redundantly used in Lewis’ film.
Final Thoughts:
Arguably, its depiction of American’s sour, rotten capitalistic core may be nothing new in the annals of the Western. But no one does it with such devilish relish and provocative panache as Trumbo, Young, and Lewis and the nightmare they conjure in Terror in a Texas Town.
Film Review: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc Review: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
