Film review: Terror in a Texas Town (1958)

 

Criterion has just added a set of films starring Sterling Hayden to the channel, and having seen the classics The Killing and The Asphalt Jungle, this one seemed an easy alternative.  Hayden is probably most famous for his role as the crazy general in Dr. Strangelove, but he got his start playing sad-sack tough-guy lugs.  He's sort of the good guy (well, relatively - he's usually the protagonist, even if he's an anti-hero) blonde mirror image of Robert Ryan, similarly tall (Hayden 6'5", Ryan 6'4") and similarly frowning and craggy.  Here he plays "stolid" more than "mean," and adopts a heavy Swedish accent (but somehow avoids making it comical, probably just by his sheer physical presence), and is a whaling son of a whaler, returning from the sea to the farm in Texas that his father settled 19 years earlier.  Alas, just days before he returns, we see the father get bumped off by the dressed-like-Jack-Palance-in-Shane gunsel (played as world-weary and sour rather than pure evil, to somewhat the detriment of the film by an actor called Nedrick Young) who is in the employ of gross landgrabber Ed McNeil (played by the corpulent Sebastian Cabot, 

whose voice is instantly recognizable as the narrator of the Winnie the Pooh cartoons), who claims to own most of the land around this particular Texas town because of a land grant, and intends to clear off all the "squatters" who've been farming there for at least two decades (and, in the case of the heroic (and, naturally, doomed) Latino farmer, for many generations), because he knows that there is oil under the land.  Anyway, we're briefly introduced to the senior member of the Swedish Hansen family attending a meeting of the local farmers where they're trying to pluck up courage to fight back against McNeil (and failing).  

One person who stands with Père Hansen is his neighbor, Jose Mirada, who is with him the next day (albeit, hiding in the shed with his little son called, naturally, Pepe) when the black-clad Johnny (nobody in this film will ever let you forget he's called Johnny.  In general, what is it about the name "Johnny" that makes people say it in every sentence they address to the eponymous character?) Crale rides up and demands that Hansen sign the document ceding the land to McNeil.  When Hansen instead commands Crale to get of his land and brandishes his whaling harpoon at him, 

Crale shoots him dead.  However, Mirada's heavily pregnant wife prevails on him not to tell anyone, because the town sheriff is in McNeil's pocket, and there's the two kids and the coming baby to think of...  At this point Hansen Jr. (Hayden's George) arrives in town on the train and has to be told that his Pop, that he hasn't seen for 19 years, has just popped his clogs, and furthermore, the farm that he co-owns and to which he's been mailing money for that time, isn't really his.  Naturally, he doesn't take this well, vowing both to live on his land (although he is persuaded to stay in the town's hotel, also home to Crale and McNeil) and find his father's killer.  And that's essentially the movie.  He does get beaten up 

and put on a train out of town after refusing McNeil's $300 offer, and Jose tells him what he'd discovered the day of his father's shooting, that there's oil under the land, and George sends the word out to gather all the townspeople to tell them, when Crale gets word that Jose was a witness and will blab, and comes to make sure he doesn't.  However, Jose dies so nobly that it unsettles Crale (he keeps repeating that he's met a man who was not afraid to die, although I have to say, Jose didn't look too phlegmatic about the whole affair to me), and McNeil razzes him one too many times... and it sets up the showdown teased both in the poster and in the opening "flash-forward" scene of the movie, between George and his harpoon 

and Crale and his two guns (only one of which he can actually use, owing to having had one hand blown off, the reason he wears the creepy black gloves).

A lean little B-Western.  It would've gone nicely with the Western Noirs we watched in 2020, although not really as good.  Hayden is good, but everyone else is a bit episodic-TV quality.  Apparently the script was by Dalton Trumbo and is thus supposed to be very lefty, but apart from painting Cabot as a pantomime fatcat villain, it seems pretty much the usual sticking-up-for-the-little-guy that you could get in a John Ford film.  There's the noble Latino and the fact that the villains are anti-immigrant (in this case, that well-known rabble-rousing immigrant group, the Swedes), but...  More could've been made of the character of Crale than old Nedrick makes.  He has a fraught relationship with his ex-hooker (it's strongly implied) girlfriend, but the dialog is definitely stilted (and "Johnny" is every other word out of her mouth).  He's sort of a doomed last-of-his-kind killer, but that just makes him less of an ogre than more of an interesting one.  There is the nicely cynical scene where McNeil's bought sheriff turns up to tell him about George coming into town at the head of a mob, only to find him lying face-down in the pile of money he was trying to pay Crale off with.  Without batting an eye, the sheriff scoops up the cash and takes off his badge.  But on the whole, a bit undistinguished. (For a different view, and some interesting background info, including on Nedrick, go here.)