What a waste of my time!!!

Sadly Over-hyped

I'll tell you why so serious

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

It's always amazed me that this lavishly produced, excitingly scripted and thrillingly staged western has no following. Perhaps it's the cast that has failed to attract the fans. Victor Mature is always acknowledged to have delivered a fine portrayal in Ford's My Darling Clementine, but he's just as effective here, even if the role is less showy. Heroine Coleen Gray is never numbered among the greats, yet she too has given a number of telling portraits. We enjoyed her characterization here. With the support players of course there are fewer cavils. No critic in his right mind would fail to praise the likes of Reginald Gardiner, Albert Dekker, Fred Clark, Charles Kemper, Charles Stevens and company. Gardiner has the most showy role, but all contribute engrossing performances.Lucky Humberstone has directed in an appropriately bravura style, assisted by Harry Jackson's striking studio and Arizona location cinematography. The large sets are equally impressive. So is Newman's score. This is a handsomely mounted and produced western which still comes across with tremendous force and power.In fact, despite its catchpenny title, to my mind, Fury at Furnace Creek rates as director Bruce Humberstone's masterpiece, breathtakingly photographed with a strong plot line and spectacular action sequences. The large cast acquits itself well and production credits are honorable in all departments. Humberstone's forte is action, but he handles the dialogue confrontations with equal ease. The script is peopled with interesting characters and only a somewhat conventional romantic interest dulls an otherwise really outstanding production. The climax is a tour-de-force of edge-of-the-seat excitement, the absence of music and the high contrast photography contributing to the dramatic effect. Both stationary camera angles and running inserts are used in the chase sequences - in Humberstone's expert hands, both are equally effective.

A superior B Feature. Mature and Langan are the sons determined to prove their father, the commander of a lonely cavalry outpost, acted correctly and was not responsible for the fort's destruction in an Indian attack. In doing so they expose a plot by Dekker to buy up cavalry land rich in mineral deposits for a pittance. Script and direction give the production a stylish edge. It's not the question if Victor Mature is a good actor or not. I wouldn't like to decide this. It's like real life: Some real people also leave the impression of being bad actors. It's Mature's face that is interesting. It looks not only attractive, but uncommon, too. Behind it seems to be much more than you can immediately see, waiting to be revealed at any moment, wherefore it's interesting to watch him.

I'm not sure if Victor Mature is suited to a Western. I didn't think much of him in 'My Darling Clementine'. He was okay in 'Kiss of Death', but it was Richard Widmark that made that film, not Mature. What this film lacked was someone for Mature to play off and react to rather than just being the lead. In 'Samson and Delilah' he had a good script and a good director. This film doesn't have a good script, although you could argue that the direction was good. If Mature had a good script, or a good actor to play off, then maybe it would have lifted his performance. If a film totally relies on Mature then it's not going to stand the test of time. Such is the case with this film.

Fury At Furnace Creek has a most ruthless and cunning villain in control of some recently opened up territory. How Albert Dekker got control has him and his gang fomenting an Indian War with a massacre of a supply train and then an army fort. General Robert Warwick gets the blame for this when Captain Reginald Gardiner testifies at Warwick's court martial that he got an order to leave the wagon train unescorted on a written order from Warwick which disappears. Warwick dies on the stand of his court martial with his name still under a cloud.However Warwick has two sons one is army captain Glenn Langan who takes a leave of absence to clear his father. The other is Victor Mature who was the black sheep of the family. They both work at clearing their father, sometimes at cross purposes though. Victor Mature borrows a lot from his portrayal of Doc Holliday in My Darling Clementine in playing the black sheep son. I'm sure that Darryl Zanuck seeing the reviews Mature got for Doc Holiday led Zanuck to cast Mature in the lead of Fury At Furnace Creek.Albert Dekker who played a slew of villainous parts in the Forties is one shrewd piece of work here. He overreaches however in his villainy. Better to have let the Indians do their own thing, but he's brought Chief Jay Silverheels in on his plans and doublecrosses him. That would turn out to be his downfall.Providing comic relief as he usually did in films of the Forties is Charles Kemper who plays a boisterous muleskinner who likes to party hearty and regrets it. There's no jail in the town so Kemper is chained to an uprooted tree trunk and carries it around with him. It's a marvelous sight gag without any dialog. I was imagining Andy Griffith doing that with Otis Smith as Mayberry's town drunk.The relationship of Mature and Langan also borrows a bit from the Warner Brothers classic The Oklahoma Kid with the good and bad brothers working at cross purposes to bring law and order into the territory. It turns out better for these brothers as well.Fury At Furnace Creek is a good western, for Mature a good followup to his western debut in My Darling Clementine.