Rawhide

A lonely stage station in Arizona. Two men run it: an older keeper and a young clerk raised in the east. A woman travelling with her small niece is forced to stay over. That night four escaped convicts take the station and settle in to wait for the gold coach due in the morning. The subject is not the robbery but who will break during the wait. The four do not trust each other; one of them is plainly dangerous and the others know it. The tension comes not from the guns but from how long the morning takes to arrive. The form is built on a single location. The station house, the barn and the rocks around them. The camera rarely goes outside, and that enclosure is the film's strength. It is read as the same director's earlier noir carried over into a western; the plot and the hostage structure are alike. The scene with the child at the end is unexpectedly tense for the period. Tyrone Power plays the clerk, Susan Hayward the woman and Hugh Marlowe the leader of the gang, with Jack Elam as the most dangerous of them. Henry Hathaway directs. Who it is for: viewers who like enclosed westerns and suspense. Who it is not for: anyone expecting wide landscape; the film takes place almost entirely in one yard.