The first of Anthony Mann's series of Western masterpieces with James Stewart, this is the marvellously-scripted story of a man and a gun. Stewart wins a fantastically accurate rifle in a shooting contest, but it is stolen by his no-good half-brother Stephen McNally. Jimmy, with resolute vindictiveness, sets out to track down the varmint, and the gun is passed from hand to hand around the West until it returns to its rightful owner for a final shoot-out in inhospitable rockery.
Will Geer is fun as a folksy Wyatt Earp, whose reputation impresses even Stewart, and Winters is surprisingly comfortable in Western gear as a pioneer wife left to the Indians by her rotten fiancé. Present are all the great Mann-Stewart ingredients: hostile landscape, complex history, family revenge, bursts of violence and obsessive brooding.
