Mini-Review: The Halliday Brand (1957)

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Dir. Joseph H. Lewis

Regardless of my thoughts, The Halliday Brand looks exceptional. Joseph H. Lewis, in just a few films, has shown a tremendous visual eye, encapsulated by the dark smoke covered alleys of The Big Combo (1955) and the gangsters standing in the middle of it blurred, and with The Halliday Brand, cinematographer Ray Rennahan adds to this with his talents. The black-and-white images, of closed rooms, cramp and shadow covered, to wide open plains, sprawling and at points baroque in look, are sumptuous with a rich use of lighting. At points it fells naturalistic, at others stylised and artificial, like a summary of the western genre in terms of images. After his sheriff father (Ward Bond) may have deliberately allowed a half American Indian employee to be lynched, because of his racism and hatred of the idea of his daughter being in love with him, one of the sons (Joseph Cotton) decides to act in a way to make his proud, egotistical father crawl on his belly to apologise for his nature. Using the dissolve flashback to enter its back-story for most of the film, the old, no longer used editing effect causing a complete fraction of time as an entire chapter in a person's life goes for just a minute in the present for them, the relationship between the father and son is problematic even on the father's deathbed.

As a technical piece of visual art, it's great, but the narrative is minor. It is enough when supported by the film's visual splendour and the prescience of the actors, especially Cotton and Bond, but by itself it doesn't match up to something like Lewis' own Terror In A Texas Town (1958). It feels lacking in story, which even in such a short length could have juggled this parental divide alongside the romance with the lynched man's sister (Viveca Lindfors), the son's brother and Cotton's character, but as is the case with such a continually churned out genre, it fells underwritten, with the ending feeling like a big anticlimax. It's more of a personal taste as times, but which such a visual eye to it, this isn't the film that's going to push Joseph H. Lewis (yet) from being a fascinating director to a great one. I'm going to have to see more of his films to see if this can happen.

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Mini-Review: Terror In A Texas Town (1958)

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/6rJSRxVsTuM/s1600/Terror%2Bin%2Ba%2BTexas%2BTown.jpg

Dir. Joseph H. Lewis

USA

The old motto is to never bring a knife to a gunfight. At the beginning of this western from the director of The Big Combo (1955), a man brings a harpoon to a duel, so large that it makes the one from Strike of Thunderkick Tiger (1982), the film I reviewed a month ago, look like a toothpick. Said man is George Hansen (Sterling Hayden), who comes to a tiny town only to discover his father was killed. As he investigates the cause of this, he begins to be wary of an enforcer (Sebastian Cabot) for a rich tycoon who has no qualms about using force. The film is only seventy seven minutes long, a lean, solid tale. Unlike The Big Combo, which undermined its point as film noir by having its protagonist get on his soapbox and rant for no justifiable reason when the plot laid it out for him, this is too short to allow itself to be bogged down by bloat in the dialogue and events, and in the character of Hansen has a man with a likeable personality who just wants to claim his father’s farm and nothing else.

Hayden is good in his main role, passing off, and I am serious with this comment, as a lovable bear of a man who yet has the curved-from-cliff face of a Lee Marvin who will snap when his immense patience is broken.  Cabot is just as good thought, his villainous character allowed to have time to flesh him out alongside his love interest Molly (Carol Kelly), showing him as a heartless villain who yet is vulnerable and could have been a great man if he tried. As I watch more westerns, I am finally getting more enamoured by them, not just the later ones post-Serios Leone and Sam Peckinpah, as the good ones like this show both good genre storytelling and exhibit American culture and moral tales through a genre that has been repeated hundreds of times and yet still be watchable. Terror In A Texas Town does not attempt to be more than a short length western, and succeeds incredibly well.

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