Hangman's Knot

1865, Nevada. A Confederate troop under Major Matt Stewart ambushes a Union convoy carrying gold and kills the escort. Then they learn from a wounded soldier that the war ended a month ago. What they have done is no longer war but robbery. They take the gold and run, and a posse comes after them. Before long they are trapped at a stagecoach station. Roy Huggins wrote and directed the film; the man who would later create television series like The Fugitive and The Rockford Files made his only feature here. Randolph Scott plays the major and Donna Reed one of the passengers trapped at the station. Eighty-one minutes. The mould is the western, but a moral question sits at its centre: what do you become if you learn while carrying out an order that the war is over? The film does not make that easy to answer either.