The Law and Jake Wade

A western set in the American West. Jake is marshal of a small town. He has an orderly life, a fiancée, and nobody knows his past. One day he goes to a jail. He breaks out a man about to be hanged. The man is Clint. They robbed together once and Jake is paying a debt. But Clint does not thank him. He finds him, attaches himself, and wants something. Money from a robbery years ago is buried. Only Jake knows where. They take his fiancée too. Peggy is with them as a hostage and the group moves into the desert. From there the film is a journey. A ghost town, a church, a well and a night. Clint's men are uneasy as well. Nobody trusts anybody and there are separate calculations inside the group. There is a third threat. Native groups in the region are on the move and nobody in the desert is safe. What the narrative is interested in is not money but the past: Jake has built a new life and the film questions how far he has earned it. Clint is bad but not simple. He carries Jake's leaving him as a personal betrayal. The landscape is part of the narrative. It was shot in real desert and mountain locations; the ghost town section is its best built part. The running time is short. The film runs a little over eighty minutes and lingers nowhere. Robert Taylor, Richard Widmark, Patricia Owens and Robert Middleton are in the cast. John Sturges directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1950s westerns and tension between two men. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by the writing of the woman; Peggy functions almost entirely as a hostage.