The citizens of Red Valley, Utah, earn their money herding wild horses for the Union Army.** In a clever scheme, crooked bank president Stanley Clanton (Porter Hall) and partner Willie McLeod (Edgar Buchanan) hire bandits to break into the bank and rob its safe, only Clanton and McLeod have secretly moved the money out of the bank earlier that day. After giving the understandably surprised bandits a $10,000 cut after escaping empty-handed, Clanton offers his angry customers 50 cents on the dollar recompense. In doing so he pockets an easy $80,000 and looks like a hero in the process.

Meanwhile, outlaw Cheyenne Rogers (a very young Glenn Ford) rides into town after stealing Sheriff Steve Upton's (Randolph Scott) horse. In classic Western tradition, the two are old friends on opposite sides of the law. Rogers, using the alias "Bill Smith," visits "Countess" Maletta (Claire Trevor), with whom he was raised in Wyoming. The Countess tells Cheyenne's hulking, explosives-expert partner, "Nitro" Rankin (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams) that years ago Cheyenne had gone after some claim jumpers that had murdered Maletta's father; men were killed, and the basically decent Cheyenne has had a price on his head ever since.

Seizing the opportunity of Cheyenne's arrival into town, Clanton and his men accuse the outlaw of robbing the bank, creating problems for Steve, who believes his old friend to be innocent, and for cowgirl Alison (Evelyn Keyes) who falls in love with Cheyenne and is unaware that own her father, Willie McLeod, is actually involved with the robbery.

The Desperadoes is no great Western but it delivers plenty of action (including a visually spectacular wild horse stampede, an interesting variation on the Western movie cliche, and a wild barroom brawl rivaling the one in North to Alaska), romance, and color. Especially color. Given the enormity and weight of three-strip Technicolor cameras, and the normally gaudy results under the tasteless guiding hand of Technicolor supervisor Natalie Kalmus, The Desperadoes is both impressively cinematic and eye-pleasingly subtle, almost naturalistic in its photography. George Meehan (who that same year shot Moe, Larry, and Curly in They Stooge to Conga!) and Allen M. Davey shoot from inside stagecoaches, race alongside galloping horses and the like to good effect; the outdoor photography especially is very, very good. Similarly, the art direction credited to Lionel Banks (possibly only credited as a department head) and Perry Smith is lavishly appointed and on-par with top A-Western budgets.

Director Charles Vidor (who married actress Keyes around this time) keeps things moving but mostly plays traffic cop to the action. The picture is such a swirling pool of Western movie iconography -- bank robbers, stampedes, burly sidekick, barroom brawls, and explosions -- there's little room for anything like real characterization. Though top-billed, Randolph Scott and Claire Trevor all too clearly are playing second fiddle to the romance between up-and-coming contract talent Glenn Ford (soon to become Columbia's biggest male star) and Evelyn Keyes. He's handsome and she's sexy in her leather riding pants but that's about it.

Talk about overkill: the film has comedy relief from three sides, namely Buchanan, Williams, and Raymond Walburn as a stereotypical western town judge. The latter especially is hard to take.

Video & Audio

Presented in its original full-frame aspect ratio, The Desperadoes is a beauty. Columbia/TriStar Home Video seems to have gone back to the original color separations, as the image is hypnotizingly rich and sharp with only minor misalignment here and there (much of which seems in-camera rather than in the printing). Though it sometimes shows its age, the film looks like it could have been shot yesterday, while keeping with the color design standards of the mid-1940s. The mono sound is perfectly acceptable for its vintage. Optional English and Japanese (but not French or Spanish) subtitles are included. There are no Extra Features, not even a trailer.

Parting Thoughts

Though hardly in the league of The Searchers, Red River, and High Noon, The Desperadoes is a colorful spectacle, with lots of charisma in its leading and supporting performances, and enough action set pieces to make it worthwhile.

**The picture is set in 1863, though the sloppy scripting makes reference to Custer's Last Stand, which of course took place more than a dozen years later.

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.