I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Although Fred MacMurray said he never was comfortable in westerns he gives a pretty good account of himself in the title role in Face Of A Fugitive.As this opens MacMurray is being transported to jail, but his brother Ron Hayes busts him out and in the process the Marshal doing the escorting and Hayes both wind up dead. MacMurray manages to hop a freight train that takes him miles from the escape and a chance to create a new identity.Probably it would have been better to just keep going, but MacMurray intervenes in a dispute with the local Ponderosa owner Alan Baxter and inexperienced sheriff Lin McCarthy. Part of it is McCarthy's pretty sister Dorothy Green.Part of it is Baxter is a really vicious bully who has fenced off a large piece of government land for his own use. McCarthy keeps cutting the wire and Baxter retaliates.Baxter's foreman is played by James Coburn in one of his earliest roles. In those days I recall seeing Coburn on a whole slew of TV westerns playing all kinds of villains. His role is very typical of what I would see on television.MacMurray does well by the part as a troubled man who looks back on his life with many regrets. The climax is a High Noon type shootout with Baxter, Coburn, and a few others. But in this case it's rather obvious that this was an afterthought ending and the original had MacMurray dying. It would have made for a better film.Still Face Of A Fugitive is pretty good as is.

If you had to pick out a single film to represent the less-than-A features Hollywood was grinding out in the 1950s, this might do the job. It practically defines "routine." It is inexpensively made on one or two Western ranches established only for use in cheap movies, it has no recognizable stars except the fading Fred MacMurray. The script, while not uninteresting, is strictly functional and lacks grace.The photography and direction do no more than get the job done, nor does the score by Jerry Goldsmith, still operating within strictures imposed by commercial considerations. Imagine if Goldsmith had written a musical score built around a trumpet and some plucked piano strings, as he did later for "Chinatown". He'd have had all the time in the world after that to sit down and write the Great American Symphony.The film isn't an insult to the intelligence though. MacMurray tries to help his reckless younger brother to escape and the brother kills a sheriff and is killed himself in return. MacMurray, heretofore a nice guy, is now involved in a murder. He manages to escape from the town and find a new place, where he makes acquaintances, assumes a new identity, and nervously awaits the arrival of the "Wanted" posters that will reveal him for who he is. He helps the clean-cut local sheriff out of a jam, gets the girl, and redeems himself.The characters have some complexity built into them. The bad guy, for instance, is Alan Baxter. He has possession of some grazing land that belongs to the public and he keeps fencing it off, despite the dire warnings of good-guy sheriff Francis De Sales. That's "bad", true, but Baxter himself has no desire to kill the sheriff unless it's absolutely necessary. And he's related to MacMurray's new girl friend, so allegiances aren't simply lined up, one side against the other, as on a checker board.But, aside from the main question of how MacMurray is ever going to recapture his virtue -- there's never much question about whether he WILL or not -- the script looks like an outline for a story. Absolutely nothing happens that doesn't advance the plot.I'll give one example of how simple it would have been to raise this story beyond the plodding. It involves Alan Baxter, the chief heavy. Baxter had a decent career in smaller roles but he was never a bravura actor and didn't show much in the way of range. Yet, in Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur" he played a well-mannered Nazi spy who has an extraordinary conversation with hero Robert Cummings in the back seat of a car. It's all very casual. Baxter tells Cummings about his son. He would like to raise him with long hair. When he, Baxter, was a child, he had long golden curls and he wonders about grooming his own child the same way. ("You'd be doing the kid a favor to get him a haircut", replies the all-American hero.) The exchange lasts about one minute but humanizes the villain. It tells us of his weaknesses, his misguided fantasies, his childhood, and his love for his son.There is nothing here that even resembles that moment. MacMurray, for whatever reason, slogs through his role in monotones, has the requisite fist fight in a bar, severs a strand of barbed wire with a shot from fifty feet away, crawls blooded through the dusty saloon of an abandoned town, and so on. None of the actors outperform MacMurray though. The performances are all routine. The whole production is routine.

**SPOILERS** Interesting western about a hardener bank robber Jim Larsen, Fred MacMurray, who has a sudden change of life after a aborted escape that cost the deputy sheriff's, who was escorting him to prison, George Allison, Francis De Sales, life. This never would have happened, Allison's death, if it wasn't for Jim's kid brother Danny, Ron Hayes, who just happened to show up from out of nowhere with a couple of horses and cash to help his big brother escape. As if Jim really needed him to be there in the first place!Shot and seriously wounded during the shootout Danny becomes a drag in Jim's escape attempt and when he finally expires, from his gunshot wound, Jim in his trying to get the wounded man to a doctor had lost all chance of escaping. In that all the roads leading out of the territory had been sealed off by the posse thats tracking him down!Knowing that he's now stuck with nowhere to go Jim decides to take on a new identity and blend in with the local population, at the town of Tangle Blue, as the friendly and likable, something that people in that profession are not at all noted for, mine inspector Ray Kincaid. This sham on Jim's part does work for a while until he get's romantically involved with the town's newly installed lawman Sheriff Riley's, Lin McCarthy, widowed sister Ellen, Dorothy Green. It's then that Jim is forced to take sides in taking on this crazed and unpredictable, in just what outrageous act he's going to do next, landowner Reed Williams, Alan Baxter. The land that Williams claims he owns is in fact owned by the US Government yet still the land obsessed Williams threatens to shoot anyone-even Sheriff Riley-who as much as dares, by taking down the barbwire fence he has surrounding it, to enforce the law!Fred MacMurray is as good as ever as hunted fugitive Jim Larsen who realizes that the life of crime that he's been leading will only lead him into an early grave like it did his kid brother Danny. Jim also knows that sooner or later he'll have to pay for his crimes and that running away form them will only makes things even worse! Like committing a new slew of crimes, like in the killing of Deputy Sheriff Allison, in his trying to escape from the long arm of the law. ***SPOILERS*** It's when Jim decided to go straight in him preventing Sheriff Riley from being murdered by Williams and his band of murderous cut throats that in a way cleared the books on all the crimes he committed up until then. But only with the sheriff his sister Ellen and the grateful people of Tangle Blue not with those who ended up being victimized, in Jim's string of train and bank robberies, by him.

I must admit, I have never before liked any movie that starred Fred McMurrey. This is a first.The action moves slowly here, as much of the tension has to do with how the characters think and interact. However, that's exactly what makes it special. Even the female lead has important lines, which is exceedingly rare in this genre. McMurray's character is one you would expect Gary Cooper to have played, and he pulls it off surprisingly well.While not a classic, this is an extremely well-made Western, and I highly recommend it.