After Marshall Matt Morgan (Douglas) finds his wife brutally raped and murdered, he resolves to find the killers and bring them to justice. The two cowboys, Rick Belden (Earl Holliman) and Lee (Brian Hutton) inadvertently left a saddle behind, and Matt recognizes it as belonging to an old friend, Craig Belden (Anthony Quinn), whom Matt knew when both were outlaws. Traveling by train to Gun Hill, Matt finds Craig the owner of a prosperous cattle ranch, and in complete control of Gun Hill itself.

Both Matt and Craig quickly realize that Rick and Lee murdered Matt's wife, but Craig refuses to surrender his son, though Matt flatly announces he'll be taking them back on the nine o'clock train anyway, the last train from Gun Hill.

James Poe's script, from Les Crutchfield's story, has elements in common with several other Westerns, but most notably plays like an inside-out version of High Noon. In that film Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) finds himself alone, the town's citizens unwilling to help him, as the minutes ticked inexorably toward high noon when a train bearing Frank Miller is due to arrive, with the gunslinger bent on killing Kane for sending him to prison. In Last Train from Gun Hill, Marshal Matt Morgan is likewise alone, for similar reasons, and this time he's bent on bringing someone to prison, and waiting for a train so he can get the hell out. Stylistically the pictures aren't anything alike (though Dimitri Tiomkin scored both films), but it does play almost as High Noon in reverse, even more so than Rio Bravo (1959), a direct reaction to Fred Zinnemann's 1952 classic.

The film also uses a doppelganger device in having both Matt and Craig widowers, both with one son. By implication they were ruthless outlaws but Matt eventually became civilized while Craig merely went legit (but the ruthlessness remained) through his wealth and power on the frontier. The rich script even finds room to address issues of race: Matt's wife was a full-blooded Indian and for that reason alone her death is marginalized in Gun Hill.

As he did in all his best films, John Sturges infuses it with tense energy. He was great at using simple camera movement, tracking shots and the like for maximum impact (such as those chilling crane shots in The Great Escape of the POWs' barracks, which in their downward motion reveal the wall of barbed wire that separates them from freedom). (Mild Spoiler) The climax is a nail-biter, partly due to Sturges's decision to eschew Tiomkin's overly busy music entirely in favor of the quiet crackling sounds of a building on fire, as all of Gun Hill tensely awaiting the outcome of Matt's last efforts to bring Rick to justice. Throughout Sturges uses subtle little visual devices in interesting ways. When the wagon carrying Matt's wife overturns, during the rape Sturges shoots through one of the wagon wheels, still spinning amid the violence. When Matt arrives later, the wheel has stopped spinning, a visual clue that she's dead.

Although Quinn struggles with an unruly southern accent, both Douglas and Holliman are excellent, the latter giving one of his best early-career performances. Rick is both weak and immoral. He cowers when caught in a lie, but goads Matt when he thinks his powerful father will come to his rescue. Douglas, steely-eyed with determination, is perfectly cast as a man struggling to keep boiling emotions in check while there's still a job to do. After Rick, handcuffed to a bed, sarcastically suggests Matt stand close to the hotel window where Craig's men stand ready to kill him, Matt viciously shoves Rick, bed and all, right into the window to perhaps receive Craig's bullets.

The production is fairly lavish for a Western, including the train of the title which, unusual for a Western, runs through the center of town. There are odd little mistakes throughout, however. The reflection of boom mikes can be seen in several different scenes, and one of Quinn's last lines is so obviously looped by someone else as to sound ridiculous. Most peculiarly, big Glenn Strange appears briefly as a saloon bouncer in Matt's town, only to turn up again as one of Craig's men, in a town shown to be a long train ride away. Maybe he needed that second job.

Video & Audio

Last Train from Gun Hill looks adequate but could look a whole lot better. Filmed in the horizontal VistaVision format, the image is 16:9 widescreen but sourced from standard 35mm print-down elements. The resultant image is reasonably sharp but presumably could look phenomenal if the horizontal 35mm negative had been used instead. (This seems to have been done with another recent Paramount DVD, The Delicate Delinquent, which looks superb.) The transfer also has its share of both horizontal and vertical scratches, as well as a bit of warping, though these are generally minor, as is the frequent but only mildly distracting speckling. Originally printed by Technicolor, the color is good, and even in this form the benefits of the VistaVision format are apparent. The Dolby Digital mono (English only) is par for the course; one wonders if this had a full stereo or Perspecta release originally. French and Spanish speakers are out of luck; this title has English subtitles only, and no Extra Features at all.

Parting Thoughts

Though not as well known as John Sturges's biggest blockbusters, Last Train from Gun Hill is nonetheless one of his best films. After hitting it big the director was frequently let down by mediocre scripts, but not here, and both he and Kirk Douglas are at the top of their form.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.