The Secret of Convict Lake

Winter in the Sierra Nevada. A group of convicts who have broken out of prison are caught in a snowstorm, and the way leads them to a small settlement where the men are all away and only the women are left. For most of the group it is somewhere to rob. For Jim Canfield there is another matter: the man who had him jailed for something he did not do lives in this place. Michael Gordon's film is a thriller in western clothing: it feeds less on gunfire than on the tension between two sides forced to stay in the same house. The women are frightened, but they are not unarmed either. Glenn Ford plays Canfield and Gene Tierney the most stubborn of the women, with Ethel Barrymore and Ann Dvorak in the cast. The snow stands throughout as the real wall that makes escape impossible.