280. Silver Lode (1954)

Directed by Allan Dwan

Synopsis

Just like High Noon but there is no train, no clocks, no great music and the bad guys present themselves as U.S. Marshalls.

Review

The Western often gets the undeserved reputation of being an essentially politically conservative film form. But in this heyday of McCarthyism no genre was as quick to condemn it as the Western.

This film ends up being a sub-par remake of High Noon but it has the political courage of making the parallels with McCarthyism all the more obvious by calling the villain McCarty and making him present himself as a defender of the law.

So the film has balls, and it entertains and educates for the 80 minutes it takes, still if you must watch a Western about McCarthyism it has to be the incomparable High Noon, which makes this film kind of redundant. Scrap that, completely redundant. Unless you are so obsessed with watching films in colour that you can't watch High Noon, and if you are one of those sub-humans what are you reading this blog for? Can you even read?

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

After making a series of westerns and comedies, Dwan directed fellow Canadian Mary Pickford in several very successful movies as well as her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, notably in the acclaimed 1922 Robin Hood.

Following the introduction of the talkies, in 1937 he directed child-star Shirley Temple in Heidi and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm the following year.

Over his long and successful career spanning over 50 years, he directed over 400 motion pictures, many of them highly acclaimed, such as the 1949 box office smash, Sands of Iwo Jima. He directed his last movie in 1961.

He died in Los Angeles at the age of ninety-six, and is interred in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery, Mission Hills, California.

Allan Dwan has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6263 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.

As there are no videos of Silver Lode you get the full video of 1922's Robin Hood, directed by Alan Dwan (the same director as Silver Lode) starring Douglas Fairbanks: