Ramrod

There is a feud in the valley between the cattlemen and the sheepmen. Connie Dickason loses her fiancé to it and inherits his ranch. Rather than marry Frank Ivey, who runs the valley and whom her father wanted her to marry, she decides to work the place herself. She hires Dave Nash, newly off the drink, as her foreman, and gathers a crew of men with grudges against Ivey. Ivey answers with violence; Dave insists on settling it through the law. André de Toth's western has Veronica Lake as Connie and Joel McCrea as Dave. It counts as one of the first films in the genre to put a woman at the centre of it. Its light and its dark both come out of film noir.