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the audience applauded

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Seen today, HELLGATE is an interesting cinematic curio that ably mixes both the western and the prison genres into a rather unique whole. Although in terms of execution the film has dated somewhat, it remains watchable thanks to the strange nature of the prison itself: a canyon in the scorching desert in which the cells have been dug into a grimy cave system.The hero of the piece is square-jawed Sterling Hayden, committed to the clink for a crime he didn't commit. The usual prison clichés are here including a particularly sadistic warden in the form of Ward Bond, but there's a greater emphasis on character than usual which makes it a pretty decent film. The direction and black and white photography could have been better but as a routine programmer this holds the attention, delivering suspense at regular intervals and building to a thrilling climax.

It makes sense as to why fictitious names would be used in this adoption of Doctor Mudd story from the days right after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Dr Mudd was imprisoned on Shark Island for giving him medical treatment, and innocently not knowing who he was. Here, a country veterinarian played by Sterling Hayden has the same thing happened to him, except the man he treats is the head of a group of guerrillas, and Hayden is sense to a hell like Prison in the middle of the wilderness in the Middle West. Even though he continues to proclaim his innocence and hopes that with his wife Joan Leslie's help, he will be freed, the prison commander Ward Bond keeps a close watch on him, hoping that he will slip up and reveal things which of course he does not know because of his innocence. What starts off great moves into extremely convoluted plot twists, with Hayden and a group of his cave dwelling prisoners escaping and being led into an attack by Native Americans and others whom Bond has out on the watch for this group. A series a bad choices in moving the plot forward culminates with ridiculous revelations being made, and that results in this being one of the most outlandish re-tellings of American history in Hollywood history.Having already been filmed as the excellent "The Prisoner of Shark Island" in 1936, the story of Dr Mudd had already been presented in a more realistic light. If there was any reason to change what had already been filmed, it was the fact that the producers knew that there was no way that this could compare with the desperate manner in which 20th Century Fox had already done 16 years before. So why do it at all?, is my question. Sterling Hayden does an excellent job as the hero, but he is defeated by a script that doesn't seem to believe in the story it is telling. Ward Bond's character is so one dimensional yet three are indications that this character has multiple personalities because his motivations continue to change at outlandish rates. For that reason I had to give this one a thumbs down, you are better off sticking with your original story or possibly even the television version done more than 20 years later which took great pains to find out details that had not been revealed before.There is also no point in having a major actress like Joan Leslie cast in the insignificant role of the devoted wife, intermittently seeing talking with people she is hoping I can find the evidence to clear him.James Arness has a thankless role as one of the people living inside the cave prison nicknames hell we are all these prisoners are kept. the ending had me raising my eyes with disbelief, and I thought how can I have suffered through 90 minutes of this for a conclusion that made absolutely no sense.it is sad to say, but this one is a piece of American history that is well worth skipping.

Sterling Hayden is a peaceable ex Confederate and family man in 1867 Kansas, during a kind of Jesse James milieu when some former soldiers had formed bandit gangs and become a nuisance. He's a veterinarian and, in his good-natured way, he treats James Anderson, who shows up at his doorstep with a damaged rib. Anderson who, along with Bill McKinney, practically had a lock on the stereotypical chain gang boss and people of that ilk, is actually the leader of one of the roving bandit gangs.Hayden, of course, being a peaceable and polite horse doctor, knows nothing of this. He makes sure that mares foal properly, if that's the word. He's just trying to get along. But the U. S. Army believes otherwise. Due to a set of unfortunate circumstances, Hayden is convicted of being a bandit and an ex guerrilla, the kind of no-goodnik who would burn down the house of a Yankee with the women and children still inside.That, in any case, is what Ward Bond thinks. Bond is the head of the prison to which Hayden is sent. The prison camp is in a broiling hot canyon surrounded by convincingly arid desert. The Army guards at the camp are aided by Pima Indians who are paid to bring in the bodies of prisoners who try to escape. These particular Pima may be as rough as they say, but generally the Pima, like their Papago neighbors, were among the first to be acculturated and settle down to a horticultural life around the Colorado River.I rather like the production design -- the dozen or so tents of the soldiers, the wooden shack that is Bond's headquarters, and the interior of the caves and the mines where the prisoners work. Corridors are carved out of obviously fake rock, reminding a view of a Boris Karloff movie, but they're atmospheric.The movie has all the requisite moments of penal unpleasantness -- the surly guards, the cruel whipping of the prisoner who misbehaves, the chipping of the escape tunnel, the hot box in the sunshine, the shackles and humiliation. We've seen it all before, in prison movies more carefully structured than this one. I will mention "Cool Hand Luke" and "I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang" in passing, but they had bigger budgets and A-list stars. And "the oven" in "The Bridge On The River Kwai" is in a class by itself.The problem -- the thing that makes this less gripping than it has a right to be -- lies in three elements. First, Charles Marquis Warren was a hack director. He makes errors that you and I wouldn't make. Too many pointless close ups of men looking at one another while nothing is happening, just for example. He's dull. Another is that the film seems hastily written. We never see the men at work. The typhus epidemic is handled perfunctorily. The disease is spread by a microorganism found in the feces of human lice (yuk) and has nothing to do with water. And neither Sterling Hayden nor Ward Bond put much effort into their performances. Hayden -- okay, he never cared for acting anyway. But I can't remember a single movie in which Ward Bond was so slow and inexpressive, not from his earliest work nor from his last period, including "Rio Bravo." The result of all this is a Western that's mediocre at best, an inexpensive rerun of "The Prisoner of Shark Island," and a movie that is entirely without poetry.

The early part of this story is the routine innocent-man-sent-to-prison story. Once Sterling Hayden arrives at the prison, however, things improve because of the unusual nature of the prison. It's located in a canyon near the southwestern tip of New Mexico. The canyon walls are more than 200 feet tall and beyond them lies a waterless desert patrolled by Pima Indians anxious to earn a reward for capturing any escapee. Prisoners are kept in underground cells. Punishment consists of being baked in metal coffins half-buried in the sand, or being whipped at a teasingly slow pace which allows the pain of each blow to sink in before the next one is delivered.Seeing how Sterling Hayden reacts to this environment and how he eventually overcomes it makes for a western which rises a bit above its standard materials.