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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Strong and Moving!

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

When the film begins, Ned Bannon (Joel McCrea) is ambushed and shot. Before blacking out, he notices a very fancy gun used by the shooter. When he comes to, he's in a camp full of settlers heading west. They've treated his wounds and he's very grateful to them. However, they inexplicably are being led by some folks who are intent on leading them onto someone else's land! They know it...but convince the very gullible settlers that Bannon is either wrong or lying. So, Bannon goes to find the landowner and convince him to give him a few days...but the folks leading the settlers reject an offer to talk and simply attack! Soon it looks like a war is about to break out...when Bannon discovers one of the folks leading the settlers has that same fancy rifle!As usual, Joel McCrea is excellent--as he was in all his westerns. While never a sexy sort of leading man in the films, he was big, strong and very believable. I just wish they hadn't made the settlers THIS stupid and pig-headed! That is a big of a weakness of the film, as they are just too easily led...or misled. Still, even with this, it's a good story and worth seeing.

Peaceful Joel McRae is riding along minding his own business, stopping to share some water with his horse, when -- BANG -- the horse is killed and -- BANG -- McRae catches a bullet right in the retroperitoneal sac. Stunned, he falls, and sees a blurry image of a man emptying McRae's canteen on the ground. Right away, we know that there are some evildoers around.What follows is an ordinary but inoffensive Western with some unusual twists. McRae's wound heals overnight after he is picked up by a wagon train of honest, God fearing sons of the soil. Their leader, James Dobson, obviously a sneak because he wears the tumultuous mustache of a sneak and looks sneaky, is taking them to Bishop's Valley, prime cattle land owned by McRae's hot-headed, burly half brother, Barry Kelley. There is an ongoing feud between McRae and Kelley.It becomes clear that the wagon train's leader plans to start a range war between Kelley and the aspiring farmers. The goal is to have them kill each other off and take over the lot. Dobson is also in cahoots with the men who shot McRae and his horse, although it's not made clear why they did it.In any case, the plot gets twisted. There are myriad lies and misunderstandings. But a couple of things save the movie from abject mediocrity. Those couple of things include Virginia Mayo's generous bosom, for instance. Her neckline was pretty daring for the period. She was never a bravura actress but she was pretty and was good at tarty roles, as in "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "White Heat." Another redeeming feature is in the casting of traditional "bad guys" as good guys for a change. The brutish Leo Gordon is an island of sanity in the Bishop Ranch's higher echelon. Michael Pate, usually a vile Indian, is a sympathetic ranch hand with some medical talent. Michael Ansara is stuck with the role of the handsome, oily, treacherous Mexican villain, despite his Syrian ancestry. He's fine in the role, as long as he doesn't have to produce any extended utterances.And although I'm not a gun freak it's nice to see that the property department came up with Henry repeating rifles instead of the later Winchesters, this being the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. A minor thing, true, but it reflects at least a little care on someone's part. The fist fights are brutal and the bruises don't disappear from one scene to the next.That there is a final shoot out should come as no surprise, but the ending leaves a few loose ends. (Who gets the ranch?)

The final phase of Joel McCrea's career was spent at Allied Artists, the renamed Monogram Pictures, where he did a group of good B westerns. The Tall Stranger based on a Louis L'Amour novel is one of the best.McCrea spots some cattle rustling and is left for dead after being shot by one of the rustlers. He's found by members of a wagon train who nurse him back to health. But Joel's real suspicious of the leader of this train of ex-Confederates who is George Neise. They're looking to settle on land owned by Barry Kelley who is McCrea's half brother and who is estranged from McCrea over the Civil War.What Neise is looking to do is start a nice range war with Kelley and his plan is based on the fact that Kelley's a mean and hard-bitten old soul who shoots first and asks questions later. It's up to McCrea to keep things from boiling over. How successful he is, you'll have to see the film for.You won't be disappointed if you do see the film. Virginia Mayo is the woman with a small son, Phil Phillips, on the wagon train that Joel takes a hankering to. A very mean and cunning villain played by Michael Ansara also has a hankering for Mayo and he's not one to go about the usual courting procedures. Besides those already mentioned such western regulars as Ray Teal, Leo Gordon, Michael Pate, and Whit Bissell are in the cast. It's nice to see Leo Gordon in a role that doesn't call for him to be a mean psychopath. The Tall Stranger is a good fast paced western that fans of the genre and fans of Joel McCrea will definitely like.

A pleasing Western, with a little more grit in it than is usually found in one of the 1950s. It starts with Zarata's brutally shooting of an innocent onlooker - the hero Ned Bannon - then emptying his water bottle and leaving him to die, Hardy's beating up his ranch-hand who didn't prevent his cattle being rustled, Ellen's (distant) nude bathe, and then her attempted rape - and she also has a "past".It was a little difficult to follow Hardy's changes in personality: his over-harsh treatment of his ranch-hand, his threatening of Ned, followed by him accepting him back into the ranch after a fist-fight, then the change of heart after Ellen's son plaintive question, "Why do you hate us"? Virgina Mayo is as eye-catching as ever, and Leo Gordon shows a great deal of screen personality. I've a feeling that McCrea had at least seven bullets in his six-shooter in the final showdown, but I'll leave others to do their own count.It was nice to see James Dobson on the big screen; his filmography suggests a good career, but I remember him best as a trooper in the old 1950s TV series "Boots and Saddles".