Truly Dreadful Film

Am I Missing Something?

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Two of television's best known cowboy heroes, Dale Robertson from Tales Of Wells Fargo and the Range Rider Jock Mahoney star in this unusual western about a town full of hypocrites. Imagine High Noon had we probed a bit deeper into the town of Hadleyville and its citizens who would not back up Gary Cooper and you have A Day Of Fury.Notorious gunslinger Robertson arrives in the town and the townspeople are righteously aroused. They want Marshal Mahoney to just run this guy out of town. But Mahoney's life was once saved by him and with no wants or warrants out on him, Robertson is a free man until he actually commits a crime.Which works out fine as Robertson bit by bit turns things around completely and it's the marshal these fine citizens turn on. You have to see how he does it, more I will not say. There's also the complicating factor that Mahoney's fiancé Mara Corday has history with Robertson.A trio of standout supporting performances come from Jan Merlin as a local tough, John Dehner as the town minister, and most of all Dee Carroll as the spinster school teacher who is a repressed and tragic figure.Mahoney and Robertson have some good chemistry in their scenes. A nice mixture of antagonism and respect goes into their dialog.A Day Of Fury is a real sleeper of a western. Caught it by accident almost, glad I did.

To challenge b&w TV, Universal turned out a number of these Technicolor B-westerns in the mid- 1950's. I don't know why they bothered with color here since the action seldom leaves town. Except for the opening scene, it looks like the entire movie was shot on the Universal lot, with no colorful vistas to spice up the visuals. That might be okay if the screenplay weren't so talky or if Jock Mahoney as the marshal could work up some emotion. Too bad he and the comely Corday appear to be walking through their respective roles. Then too, one of the great sneering punks of the period, Jan Merlin, is largely wasted in a weak role. Dale Robertson as the bad guy manages to show some life, but gets little help from director Jones who appears unengaged except for the sequence of Billy (Merlin) fleeing town, which happily shows some imagination. Actually, having a moral debt to the bad guy as the movie's premise has real dramatic possibility. But that would have taken a better director and a more motivated cast. As things stand, it's only an average oater, at best.

A well-turned screenplay, efficient editing, good small-scale production values, and tense directing make A Day of Fury much better than most Westerns.Dale Robertson is a better actor than his reputation, but all 3 leads are limited in range. The best role and performance are the Preacher by John Dehner, who helps any film in which he appears. Most Westerns present ministers either as comic-cowardly milquetoasts or as unrealistic studs who give up their guns for the good book. When changes unsettle the town, Day of Fury's Preacher is the first to lose his temper and threaten violence, but then he's embarrassed by his own failing and horrified that his parishioners turn into a lynch mob.The plot plays an interesting variation on the classic Western formula of the Old Wild West struggling to survive in or against the Cleaned-Up Bourgeois Town. The taciturnity of Robertson's Jigade fairly inverts the man-of-few-words Sheriff typically played by Joel McCrea or Randolph Scott into a Mephistophelean villain who quietly but steadily chips and shatters the thin veneer of civilization until the townsfolk break down into drunken irresponsibility, foolish greed, and vengeful terror. Jagade's opportunistic power compromises the town's Sheriff, played by the physically imposing Jock Mahoney, whose taciturnity can only dwindle to mute puzzlement until the wild card in Jagade's deck--the punk gunman Billy Brant--changes the game and creates a clear path of action for the law.The sets are few, but the director keeps moving the characters across each other in well-defined space. The film's most impressive quality is to open with an atmosphere of uncertainty that steadily escalates into tension or dread. But its most interesting feature is that the anti-hero Jagade seems to have orchestrated the story as a suicide note.

Despite the wooden acting of its stars, this film's intriguing themes and well-written dialog elevate it to something out of the ordinary. "A Day of Fury" is about the end of the Old West, embodied by the gunfighter, and its replacement by "decent folk" and their values. However, one gunfighter returns to town and exposes the hypocrisy and small-mindedness that lies beneath the veneer of civilization. This film is a must-see for those who love Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter" as it seems to have inspired that film to a large degree. (One character remarks that if Jagade is allowed to stay, "He'll turn this town into hell.") Despite the emotionless acting of its leads and the irritating, strangely pronounced name of the main character, I enjoyed this film a great deal for its cynical view of the human character and its exposure of human weakness and fear.