The Law and Jake Wade (1958)

John Sturges is the director of  two of the most popular westerns in history, Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). They're no doubt fine movies, but some of his fans (and I'm one of them) prefer his 'smaller' efforts, such as the Freudian noir-western Backlash (1956), the taut cavalry versus Indians drama Escape from Fort Bravo (1953) or the movie discussed here, The Law and Jake Wade.

Robert Taylor is Jake Wade, a reformed outlaw, now a town Marshall. His personal code of honor tells him to save the life of his former partner in crime, Hollister (Richard Widmark), who's about to be hanged in another town. Hollister had saved his life in the bad old days and Wade now considers the score settled, but Hollister has his mind on the loot from their final heist, that was buried by Wade before going straight. Hollister re-unites with his gang and forces Wade to lead them to the place where the money is buried. To make sure Jake cooperates, Hollister also captures the Marshall's bride-to-be (Patricia Owens). The journey leads through Comanche territory to a ghost town in the desert, where Wade has buried the money in the cemetery. Upon their arrival in town, they discover that they were trailed by three Comanche scouts. Hollister kills two of them, but a third one escapes ... and at night, the Indians attack ... 

The Law and Jake Wade tells a rather familiar western story about former partners now operating on different sides of the law, but Taylor and Widmark are ideal opponents and Sturges' direction is both economical and assured. Taylor is a perfect illustration of Sturges' ideas about the western hero as a silent person, a God in his own universe who resolves his issues with his gun (*1). No wonder most of the talking is done by the villain, wonderfully played by Widmark. The supporting actors are very good too, notably Henry Silva, as a sexually frustrated young man with a Freudian father complex and Robert Middleton as the good-natured gang member with a loyalty problem.  

We learn that Wade decided to go straight because he (erroneously) thought he had shot a child during their last robbery, but otherwise the script, by William Bowers (based on a novel by Marvin H. Albert) isn't over-explicative; snippets of dialogue - such as the two men discussing if the other one would do the same thing if the odds were different - inform us about their relationship: they were both part of a Confederate guerilla band during the Civil War and just turned to robbery after the war was over. It transpires that Wade never really liked Hollister but still felt responsible for him, because he realized Hollister was a psychopath. 

John Sturges

Robert Surtees' widescreen photography of the landscape is impressive, creating an almost oppressive feeling of space, reminiscent of the Boetticher westerns from the Ranown Cycle, making those men more aware of each others' presence because there's nowhere to go, nowhere to hide in this vast emptiness. The film seems to have influenced Sam Peckinpah's The Deadly Companions which has a similar structure of a horse trek through hostile Indian country leading to a ghost town in the desert, and Sergio Leone might have studied the cemetery scenes before developing the finale of The Good, the Bad & The Ugly. 

The film is not without flaws; there are a few jarring studio scenes, mainly of the group gathered around the camp fire, and some have criticized the Indian attack for being unrealistic and needlessly clichéd; the Comanche mainly climb on rooftops or ride through the town street to be picked up by the people inside the ramshackle buildings. But the arrows go "zing" and the spears and tomahawks fly around, plunging into walls right beside people's heads, evoking that old feeling of excitement we experienced when we were watching these cowboy & injuns movies as kids (and reenacted the attack later in the backyard).  

Notes:

* (1) In the book Peter Bogdanovich on the Movies, Sturges expressed his views on the genre: "Western characters must not be glamorized. (...) You can't make a Western if it's pretty. (...) Always use a lot of back lighting, and don't let the star talk too much. John Ford, you know, made John Wayne a star by not letting him talk. But the absolute must for a Western is isolation. The man must be God. And you've gotta take issues that can only be resolved by guns."