The Proud Ones

An ageing marshal is trying single-handedly to hold order in a frontier town that lives on the cattle trade. As if the crowd arriving with the herd were not enough, a gambling-house operator out of his past turns up as well. A scuffle in the casino damages the marshal's sight, and he tells nobody. A young cowhand who came in with the same drive turns out to be the son of a man the marshal killed years before. The centre of the film is these two men coming to know each other: the young man arrived for revenge, but the more he learns about how it happened, the more his verdict changes. Robert Ryan plays the marshal tired and stubborn; hiding the loss of his sight produces fear rather than heroism. Robert D. Webb's film is an early instance of the ageing lawman that late-fifties Westerns would take up. Walter Brennan is in support. It arrives at an unavoidable reckoning.