Film review: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

As you can tell from the poster, this is an Italian film, and perhaps the most important thing about it is that it stars the actor who plays the villain in Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More, who, let's be honest, sort of blows Clint off the screen in both.  He looks very different here because his hair is slicked down, but he's still got that face. 

But what to say about this film?  It's... strange.  It's not really a thriller, although it's pitched as one.  It's obviously a political commentary of sorts, but it also plays like psychodrama.  And in places it's very surreal.  The film begins with our "hero" showing up to what looks like his mistress's apartment: she greets him sultrily and asks "So, how are you going to kill me today?"  "I'm going to slit your throat," he says a leer.  Then they get into bed, she climbs on top of him and appears to be spasming in orgasm, but then falls over sideways and you see that she has, in fact, had his throat cut.  Then our man showers off but appears to be being sloppy (leaving obvious prints around) and then he takes a fibre from his tie and pushes it under her fingernail.  Then he gets dressed up in his flashy (cream colored) Italian suit and leaves.  But on the way out of the gate to the apartments, he meets a young man whom he clearly knows.  What's going on?  Does he want to get caught?  Then he drives to his office... and it turns out he's the Head of Homicide at the Police.  At least, he was - he's just been promoted to Head of the "Political" Department and is only there to congratulate his successor.  Of course, while he's there, news of the murder comes through and he goes along to view the crime scene.  On the way out (again) he is buttonholed by a reporter and tells him "it was the husband".  It looks like this is shaping up to be a film where an underling will doggedly track him down and he will be exposed for his arrogance and brought to justice - sort of Crime and Punishment crossed with Charade or something.  But him planting the tie fibres was already a hint that that is not going to happen.  In fact, his underlings do pick up plenty of evidence that it was him but instantly discount it because he is "above suspicion".  Meanwhile he quickly takes to his new job and gives fiery speeches about clamping down on the rot in Roman society, (statistics are cited of the rate of pro-Stalin, pro-Mao and pro-Ho Chi Min graffiti through the years) and we see the brutal police interrogation methods. 

(At one point someone being beaten up demands his lawyer, and the cops just snort and say "this isn't America".)  We also see a lot of flashbacks of the affair between him and his victim.  The explanation of her question at the beginning is that they've been acting out murder scenes as foreplay, and he has a ton of amateur photographs of her as corpse recreating crime scenes of his past investigative career. 

She is a real piece of work - she seeks him out to begin with, and when she first encounters him he dresses only in sober black - it is because of her that he becomes a flashy dresser, and perhaps because of her that he becomes ambitious.  But she also berates him and exposes the fact that he is a little boy underneath, which is what, in the end, seems to drive him to kill her (that and his jealousy: she was also having an affair with the young man he met on his way out, who is a well-known student revolutionary).  The message of the film is clearly that power corrupts and the system is rotten.  In the end he tries to get caught and even confesses, but nobody will arrest him because it would undermine the system.  Or is that what happens?  It's not clear - there are false endings and his victim appears again as if alive.  What's real?  Is any of this real?  I couldn't tell.  That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but a huge amount of its charm is the lead actor: he completely carries the film, and it's fortunate he is so incredibly charismatic.  But check it out and then explain it to me.

Film review: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

Jacques Demy's follow-up to Umbrellas, this one's a more traditional musical, in that there are definite separate numbers, lots of dancing, and actual speaking of lines in between the numbers.  It's also a lot sillier and bigger budget, even featuring Gene Kelly.  The candy colors remain, however, and it seems clear that it was an influence both on this and this.  Catherine Deneuve (whose hair is very silly - AKA super-60s in this one) and her real-life sister Françoise Dorléac

(don't google what happened to her) play twin sisters, the latter, Solange, a composer, the former, Delphine, a dancer, who are tired of provincial life.  They are self-employed in a studio while their mother, Yvonne, who raised them on her own, runs a cafe in the central square of the town, that nonetheless never has more than a couple of people in it at one time, one of whom always seems to be her father, who busies himself building a model aeroplane.  Passing through the cafe at various points are Maxence, a blond soldier/sailor (we see him in different uniforms) who is really an artist, Etienne and Bill, "carnies" who travel the countryside putting on shows and trying to hawk Honda motorbikes (and who, despite being self-described ladies men, give off a very gay vibe and sport little white pixie boots) and Dutrouz, an old army buddy who has just recently reunited with Yvonne's father after decades.  The last key players are Simon Dame (yes, Monsieur Dame, a silly name that plays a large role in the proceedings), a music store proprietor and his friend from conservatory days, the successful American composer Andy Miller (Kelly). 

The whole thing is a series of coincidences and missed connections.  Turns out Yvonne has a young son (implausibly named "Bouboo") of ten by a different father from the girls, whom she abandoned shortly after conceiving him because she couldn't bear the thought of taking his name and becoming, you guessed it, Mme. Dame.  (Why haven't they met?  Well, Simon has only just relocated from Paris, and he's under the impression that Yvonne is living in Mexico with a millionaire, because that's what she told him.)  But Simon knows Solange, because of the music connection, and promises to write to his friend Andy to introduce them, as he knows Andy is visiting Paris, where Solange and Delphine plan to relocate to.  Meanwhile Maxence has drawn a picture of his "feminine ideal" which gets hung in the gallery owned by the sleazy Guillaume (I forgot to mention him) who pursues Delphine constantly.  She sees it and thinks it's her (because it looks just like her) and demands to meet the artist, and while Guillaume lets slip that he's a soldier, he lies that he's already gone to Paris.  Yvonne keeps getting Etienne and Bill to go to pick up Bouboo from school because she doesn't trust the girls to remember to do so, but they do, and consequently the carnies meet the daughters in suspicious circumstances.

Solange refuses to give Bouboo up to them on the second day, something that makes him throw a tantrum (they bought him sweets the previous time) and knock her music out of her hands.  While picking it up, she bumps into Andy, visiting town to see if he can surprise his old friend Simon, and is smitten (despite the fact that Kelly looks at least 50), without learning his name.  She also leaves without a page of her composition, which Kelly later plays and is impressed by.  MEANWHILE, two dancing girls who are part of Etienne and Bill's show quit suddenly, and they convince the sisters to replace them and put on a dance number.  MEANWHILE, in a completely out-of-left-field development, there's a psychotic axe-murderer in town, who chops up an older woman and puts her in a suitcase!  Do we know him?  Well, here's Yvonne reading who it is:

Will all of our connections be made or will people keep missing each other (usually by walking into Yvonne's cafe as the other is walking out the other entrance)?  Watch it and spend an enjoyable, very French, very '60s couple of hours, with lots of implausible prancing, badly faked musicianship and outrageous hair and makeup.   But don't expect it to linger in the mind like Umbrellas did - it's as fizzy and sweet (and brightly colored) as Orangina,

Film review: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Perhaps it was a bit premature to buy the Jacques Demy Box Set of Blu Rays sight unseen, but the Criterion Collection was having a sale!  And I'd been reading about this film for a while (and somehow getting it confused with Last Year in Marienbad) so, what the hell!  And it turns out not to have been an entirely foolish purchase, at least on the evidence of this one, which more-or-less made Catherine Deneuve a star.  

The story is (purposely) slight: boy and girl are in love, boy sleeps with girl once before going to war, while he's gone, girl realizes she's pregnant and is talked into marrying a nice, wealthy young man, boy comes back with a limp and is distraught until he finds a different nice girl.  What makes it unique, apart from the lush pop colors, is that the entire movie is sung.  It's billed as a musical (and what prompted us to watch it was a list of the best musicals for each year that picked it for 1964), but I'd say it's more like an opera, because, unlike most musicals, there aren't "musical numbers," featuring standalone songs, with regular speaking bits in between, the whole thing is seamless, with every line sung.  And it works - it's not intrusive at all, but is instead completely charming.  It helps, of course, that it has such beautiful people as Catherine Deneuve (Geneviève), Nino Castelnuovo (Guy) (who, for some reason, kept reminding me of the rather weasly Casey Affleck) 

and Anne Vernon (Geneviève's glamorous mother) sashaying through it.  Its title comes from the shop that Geneviève's mother owns, which, predictably enough, is always struggling to stay afloat.  

Guy, meanwhile, works as a mechanic at a garage, and dreams of owning his own "all white" gas station (and has a little model of one in the room he lives in in the apartment of the old lady, his Godmother, who raised him.  She is always dying by inches, and is nursed by a very nice young orphan, Madeleine who clearly worships Guy, a fact he appears oblivious to.  I must confess that I found the beginning section, where Guy and Geneviève swan around professing undying love to each other dragged a bit (although it was gorgeous to look at and very easy on the ear), but gradually the film got under my skin, and by the time Guy returns I was gripped.  It is, as I said, purposely low key.  Nothing very outrageous happens, and when characters die, or Guy gets injured, it happens off-screen (unlike Guy, shipped to Algeria (the film takes place between '57 and '63), we never leave Cherbourg.  And after the first third, the lovers are separated, so that we spend the second third entirely with Geneviève, and the final one with Guy.  Only at the very end do they meet again, 

and it is not the Hollywood reunion that it would have been in Hollywood.  Guy does get his white garage, and Madeleine gets her man. Only Geneviève seems unfulfilled, which is a bit sad for her thoroughly decent and well-meaning husband, surely the only decent diamond salesman in the world, Roland (a character who was unlucky in love in the earliest film in our box set that we'll get to eventually).  

He knows the daughter Geneviève bears (Francoise) is not his, but loves her so deeply he is entirely content to raise her as if she is.  So overall, a tale of first love and the compromises that adults have to make afterwards, with no villains and the only deaths being of natural causes.  Slight, but unforgettable.

Film review: Rubber (2010)

Continuing the run of cult movies, this arrived in the mail yesterday, I'm guessing from Matthew (as it reflects his sensibilities) and I remember being curious when it came out, so we sat down to watch it.  Verdict: something of a missed opportunity.  The skeleton of the movie is a killer (used) tire/tyre, which comes to life in the desert and, after taking a while to master rolling under its own steam, quickly discovers the joy of mayhem.  It starts slowly by crushing a plastic water bottle, and then a can, and a scorpion, but then finds that it is unable to crush a glass beer bottle.

Undaunted, it discovers another power: apparent telekinesis (that is, it vibrates increasingly violently), which, Scanners style, allows it to cause things (later, predominantly human heads) to explode.  After the bottle, its next victim is a rabbit, and then a crow...  In fact, that is one beef I have: this film is not imaginative enough as a horror film.  There's a repetitivity to the whole "making things explode" thing.  But the film seems to think you'll ignore that, because the horror film is encased within a fourth-wall-breaking, "it's all just pretend - or is it?" framework.  This begins before we ever encounter the tire, with a policeman giving a speech to the camera about how all great (or at least, successful) movies have a key element of "no reason": "Why is the alien in ET brown?  No reason!  Why do the couple in Love Story fall madly in love?  No reason!"  This justifies there being no motivation or explanation for the events we are about to watch.  Nice out, huh?  This speech is delivered to a crowd standing out in the desert who are then all presented with binoculars

by a strange skinny man in a white shirt who instructs them to look in a particular direction, whereupon they witness the tire's animation.  We keep coming back to these spectators, who have to sleep out in the desert and get increasingly hungry (how did they get there?  Why did they come?  Why didn't they bring food?  Why don't they just start walking?  NO REASON.) until the skinny man, on instructions from someone he calls "master" kills and cooks a turkey for them, which they descend on en masse and devour.  And it soon transpires that it was poisoned, and they all die.  This comes as a relief to the fourth-wall-busting cop, who, when a timer goes off informing him that the poison will have acted, tells his bemused comrades (who are investigating the tire's first human kill, a maid in an old motel) that they can stop acting and go home.  They didn't think they were acting, and the corpse is real.  But he insists, and has one of them shoot him twice, which, while it seems to make him bleed profusely, does not seem to affect him.

However, the skinny man informs him that one of the spectators did not eat the poisoned turkey, so the show must go on.  Meanwhile the tire, who appears to have a bit of a crush on a French woman driving a red Golf GTI convertible (after failing to make her its first kill) and imperiously ignores the son of the motel owner who is the first person to work out that it is the killer, and wants to communicate with it, rolls off and encounters a junk yard where piles of tires are being burnt.

This MAKES IT MAD, and we cut to three days later, where it has laid waste to an entire small town, leaving headless corpses littered everywhere.  MEANWHILE, the skinny man brings an entire cordon bleu meal to the stubborn remaining spectator (an army vet in a wheelchair), but when he refuses to eat it, eats it himself, apparently forgetting it is poisoned, and dies horribly (having recounted a tale of sibling violence that removes any pity one might have had for him).  Will the tire be stopped?  Well, certainly not by the cop's stupid plan of wiring a dummy with a dynamite and piping insulting words from the French woman over a radio attached to it, in the hope the tire will blow it up.

But maybe a shotgun will work?
All in all, a bit tiresome (and no, the pun wasn't planned when that adjective occurred to me).  Either do a horror film that works or go full art film.  But this is a poor example of either.  (Although this guy seems to disagree - although he might be being sarcastic.)  (Sidenote: it also continues a strange trend of being set in some indeterminate time, perhaps the eighties, currently beloved of all pop-culture producers (that certainly fits with the cars and the cathode-ray TVs with aerobics on them), but that seems to be just a way of avoiding having cellphones involved.  Cellphones, as has often been noted, destroy so many lazy plot devices that very few film makers seem to know how to incorporate them (off the top of my head I can only think of Zootopia as a successful example).  There's also the French director's clear love of Americana, especially the old motel with the huge beautiful 50's style sign, when in fact reality would've had an ugly Motel 6.)

In its favor, I will say that the cop and in particular the skinny man (Jack Plotnick - even the actors have fake-sounding names!) perform their roles with more commitment than they deserve (although the French woman, who has to endure an entirely gratuitous (you know - for NO REASON) naked shower scene, which involves the spectators offering their opinions of her anatomy, seems to be phoning it in).  And they do manage to get the tire to exude some menace, and for us to believe that it really does have telekinesis, largely by camera angles conveying its point of view.  And how they get the tire to roll under its own steam is a mystery of movie magic.  But in conclusion, despite what the tagline on the poster says, there has to be a better "killer tyre movie" waiting to be seen.  (Did make me want to visit the desert again, though - it was beautifully shot.)

Film review: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

(Unintentionally) continuing the Buckaroo theme, we have a "cult classic" from the eighties that we've somehow managed never to have seen up till now.  Like all good cult movies, this one was a flop at the time of its release, which isn't really surprising.  The title itself is probably offputting to most people, and the plot is pretty much un-summarizeable.  But here goes.  Back in the thirties, two scientists, a Japanese one called Professor Hikita, and an Italian called Dr. Emilio Lizardo (played appropriately outrageously by John Lithgow) experimented on a method to gain access to a parallel world, the 8th dimension.  In a manner reminiscent of Back to the Future, which also features Christopher Lloyd, this involves achieving a high land speed in an appropriately-powered vehicle.  Lizardo starts the vehicle (in his case, a kind of sled on a monorail) prematurely and, while he succeeds in getting his torso stuck in the 8th dimension, appears to have gone insane when he is pulled out.  We later learn this is because his body has become occupied by an evil alien supervillain who had been imprisoned in the 8th dimension by the aliens whose planet he had terrorized.  His name is Lord John Whorfin (it turns out that every alien on this planet, male or female, is called John).  But nobody knew that at the time, and just locked him up in an asylum for the criminally insane.  Flash forward to the eighties, and Professor Hikita is now being assisted by the brain-surgeon/rock musician/adventurer,

whose parents (one Japanese, the other American) were killed by The World Crime League (which was to set up a sequel, teased in the end credits, which has yet to come to pass), Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller, who would go on to star in another (more successful) cult classic, Robocop.  His vehicle of choice is some kind of souped-up rocket car, and he manages to drive through a mountain by jumping into the 8th dimension while inside it. His success is witnessed from the asylum by Dr. Lizardo/John Whorfin, who decides now is the time to escape (by killing a guard,

whom I knew I recognized, and finally realized was Mike Ermantrout from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, only young and with hair) and steal the device that Dr. Hikita has perfected.  Meanwhile, watching from in orbit, are the good aliens, who are determine to prevent Whorfin from using the device to return whence he was banished to wreak more havoc.  There are also two groups of competing aliens, bad (played by Christopher Lloyd and two other very familiar faces, Vincent Schiavelli and Dan "Cheers/Blood Simple" Hedaya)

and good (the surviving member of which is played by Carl Lumbly (whom I knew from Cagney and Lacey).  There's also a love story of sorts, as Buckaroo notices a crying woman ("Penny Priddy" - played by Ellen Barkin) at one of his shows and recognizes her as the twin of a woman he was in love with once.  Meanwhile, the "good" aliens communicate to all (including the President of the USA, who is immobilized in a back-stretching thingie, for some reason) that they will destroy a region of the USSR unless Whorfin is stopped, as this will cause thermonuclear war to break out (which will help them, somehow).  Buckaroo and friends (who include Jeff Goldblum, being very Goldblum-y in a setting that is entirely appropriate for full Goldblum-ing), discover a way that enables them to see through the alien disguises to expose the lizardy-faced aliens beneath.  (Did this idea influence John Carpenter's They Live?  I'm sure he took that secret to his grave.)  And the crew (The Hong Kong Cavaliers

- notably Perfect Tommy, who survives, and Rawhide, who perished by alien spider (but would go on to be the voice of Spongebob's Mr. Krabs) rush around chasing John Lithgow and his bad aliens as they try to launch the spaceship they've been building since they invaded the USA on the Halloween that Orson Welles transmitted War of the Worlds - which was actually a real report of a real invasion.  Confused?  Again, this was destined to be a cult movie, watched and re-watched on VHS.  But I've got to say that it is a lot better than most self-consciously cult movies, and despite making no sense whatsoever, has surprisingly good effects, enjoyably cheesy clothes and music, and genuinely funny lines delivered by a spectacular cast.  Don't make the mistake we made of not watching this movie for far too long!  Now to track down the extended cut which features Jamie Leigh Curtis in a flashback about Buckaroo's parents!

Film review: The Bronze Buckaroo (1939)

An all-black cast in a singing cowboy movie?  From the 30s?  Yes please!  And The Bronze Buckaroo did not disappoint.  The titular hero is Bob Blake,

whose outfit looks like it was the influence for Clevon Little's Gucci outfit in Blazing Saddles.  He gets a letter requesting help from his friend Joe, and sets off with his trusty crew to the ranch where Joe and his sister live(d) with their father.  I say titular hero, because the real stars of the film are Dusty,

who is a long-time member of Bob's crew, and Slim (on the left below),

who works on the ranch, and whose first act on meeting Bob and co. is to trick Dusty (the others aren't fooled) with ventriloquism into buying a "talking" mule for 12 dollars.  And intermittently through the film, these two have comedy interludes, including a particularly good card game where each is trying to cheat the other (Slim with a good deal more success).  Turns out Joe's sister is the only one of the family left: the father was found shot in the back out on the ranch and Joe has vanished weeks ago while out investigating.  Suspicion naturally falls on their crooked rich neighbor, and it eventually emerges that there is gold on the ranch and the neighbor has been trying to get the deed by hook or by crook (although it was his thuggish (and portly) head henchman (whom Bob earlier knocks out in a bar fight after he has rather surreally attacked Dusty and Slim by the method of forcing them to smoke 4 cigars at once and drink shot after shot) who killed the father before he could sign the deed).  (The sister is of course pretty,

and she and Bob are seen riding off together at the end.)  There are several singing interludes, and the songs are catchy and the singing great, with a little bit of soft-shoeing thrown in.  And it all winds up in a big shootout out in the desert in rock formations that Jami swore were featured in Tarantula, and Jami should know her deserts, having grown up in Arizona.  I have one question though: turns out Joe wrote the letter while imprisoned by the neighbor (and threw it out into the street, where a kindly old gent found it and mailed it).  So why didn't he say "Help!  I am being held prisoner at ____" instead of the actual vague language of "Could you come and help out?"  Would've saved a lot of time investigating.  (Oh, and in case you were wondering, Dusty gets his revenge on Slim and gets his money back and gets to keep the mule.  All because of a pamphlet on how to learn ventriloquism in ten easy steps...)

Film review: The Count of Monte Cristo (1934)

I've made it only about two thirds of the way through the book, but this seemed pretty faithful to me.  Robert Donat (who stars in probably my favorite Hitchcock of all time, The 39 Steps, as well as the excellent The Ghost Goes West) is excellent as Edmond Dantes, the innocent sailor who gets thrown in prison for unwittingly delivering a letter from Napoleon, and vows revenge on the three men (a corrupt fellow-sailor, a corrupt judge (whose main reason for putting him in prison is that he can identify the judge's father as a Bonapartist) and the man who wants Dantes' betrothed for himself) as he suffers in France's equivalent of Alcatraz for decades.

Really, enough plot is packed into the novel for three full-length films, so it's understandably condensed (and devices like a switch of point-of-view are removed, which I don't think hurts (there's a reason I gave up on the book)) and there's quite a lot of expository talk, but it's undeniably gripping, packed with good characters and cliffhangers.  Pirates!  Treasure! Duels!  Financial ruin!  Devilry revealed in theatrical tableaux! A good-old-fashioned epic, which flies by, despite being nearly 2 hours long.  The good end happily, the bad unhappily - that is what fiction means. 

Our swimming routine

First, we walk (through scenic state parks, ideally) and arrive at a launching spot.  I carry a partially inflated inner tube along with me that I can add the last few puffs to at the shore.

The key part of equipment is this super nifty totally waterproof backpack.  It's more-or-less empty on the way, but when we get to the lake...

...we take off our shoes...

...and our shirts...

Here's the top that rolls up to seal it watertight...

...like so.

Then we launch!

Then we swim for around an hour-ish, until we arrive at a place to get out:

What is with the stone-stacking that everyone seems to be hooked on?

Let the air out...

...pack it in the backpack

...add the towel

And we're ready for the trip back to the car!

Film review: Man of the West (1958)

According to the somewhere that I read it, Francois Truffaut remarked that the French care about psychology or character studies while Americans care about plot (which certainly explains Simenon).  According to somewhere Jami read it, Jean-Luc Godard said that this was the best Western and Gary Cooper's finest hour.  The former explains the latter, in my view, because I was fairly unmoved by it but it certainly is some kind of psychodrama.  It's the last Western directed by Anthony Mann, also responsible for the first Western Noir we watched, The Naked Spur, and it has a lot in common with it (although, to be frank, I prefer that one).  An aging Hollywood icon plays a flawed man who finds redemption in part by saving a much younger woman (played by an up-and-coming much younger actress).  In this case the younger woman is Julie London, and actually she falls for him, rather than the reverse, as in Spur.  In both the antagonist is played by another stalwart character actor, and in this case it's Lee J. Cobb, looking nothing like how I'm used to him

(e.g. 12 Angry Men or On the Waterfront), and looking surprisingly at home well away from New York City.  The film (which is in sumptuous technicolor, and looks much more big budget than any of the other Western Noirs) begins lightheartedly enough, with Cooper arriving in town, dropping off his horse at a stable, and nervously (it's his first time) boarding a train for Fort Worth, where he is to hire a teacher for the newly-opened school in his small town.  As he reveals to the card sharp who strikes up a conversation with him, he has gathered together everyone's money in the town to pay her a year's salary up front to persuade her to move to the sticks.  With eyes on the money, the card sharp (a Sam Beasley) is trying to persuade Link that he doesn't need to go to Fort Worth to get a teacher, because his friend Billie Ellis (Julie London) who has just moved on from being a barroom singer in the town they've all just left, is trained as a teacher, when the train stops to fill up on wood, and all the male passengers are recruited to speed this up.  As this is happening, the train is attacked by horse-riding robbers, but the guard manages to get the train started and get up on it with a rifle, and shoots one of the robbers in the back.  In the end, all the robbers get away with is Link's bag, because the one that gets shot was on the train and also heard about the money.  Link and Sam and Billie are stranded and set out to find shelter.  Link leads them to a deserted-looking farm in the middle of nowhere where he says he used to live.  Turns out he used to live there because he used to be part of the criminal gang that still uses it as a base, and it's also the gang that includes the feckless train robbers.  He is reunited with Lee J. Cobb's Dock Tobin, whose name is famous in those parts but who appears to have fallen on hard times.  He only has about 6 men, one of whom is pretty simple, another of whom is a mute, and another of whom is dying in the next room of the wound in the back.  The next stretch of the film is where the psychodrama comes in.  Dock's young hoodlums are suspicious of Link and want to kill all three of the newcomers, while Dock is almost desperate to believe that his favorite protege has returned to the fold.  (It's a bit awkward: although they've made Cobb up to look old, he's supposed to be significantly older than Cooper, who by this stage was himself in his late 50s and looking older.)  It's reminiscent of yesterday's Day of the Outlaw, except that Dock is less compos mentis than Burl Ives's character and less inclined to rein in his young thugs (the nastiest of which is played by a very young Jack Lord, nothing like his Hawaii 5-0 character).  They hold Link at knifepoint and get Billie to start stripping

until Link persuades Dock that they need to get ready for the big job Dock has been dreaming about for years and is now prepared to try with Link returned.  After a night spent huddled with Billie in the shed, Link wakes to find that another old companion of Dock's, Claude Tobin, has returned from a scouting mission.  He too knew Link back when and is deeply suspicious of Link's claims, as well as being fiercely protective of his relative.  He also brings the news that Link was recognized on the train by a lawman who remembers his sordid past, so now the whole gang is being sought by the law.  Nonetheless, Dock is dead set on robbing the bank in a town called Lassoo, where, he claims, mines from all round deposit their gold.  On the way there, they stop for a break and amuse themselves by fighting, whereupon Link gets his revenge on Jack Lord

(by stripping him, bizarrely enough) whereupon the humiliated hoodlum tries to shoot Link but hits Beasley, who throws himself in front of Link.  Beasley is as surprised at this selfless act as anyone, but says, in a tragi-comic speech, that he'd done a quick calculation and worked out that he would be almost certain to be killed next if Link died, and gives the odds he worked out just before he dies in Link's arms.  Jack Lord, meanwhile is offed by Dock, and they press on.
The best part of the movie, for my money, is the raid on the bank in Lassoo.  It reveals how truly past it Dock is, and manages to be a great final shootout and a commentary on the squalidness of typical gunfighter violence.  Julie London survives, but there's every indication that she was taken advantage of by the henchmen while Link went ahead to the bank.  And once again, there's a (largely) happy ending, although Billie knows that she can't have Link, because he's got a wife and kids back in his hometown.  I have to say, though this film is much praised, it's probably my least fave of the Western Noirs, and Cooper's acting doesn't have the depth I was led to expect.  It's no High Noon, for example.  (Oh, by the way, the title comes from the fact that every time Link is asked where he comes from, he says "a town west of here" whose name he variously gives as Sawmill or New Hope.)