The Showdown

Republic Pictures, the least impoverished of the Poverty Row studios, produced quite a number of noirs, but nothing compares to the quantity of Westerns they churned out like a nonstop assembly line. The Showdown is one of the most memorable. Co-written and co-directed by brothers Dorrell McGowan and Stuart E. McGowan, the film sets a dark noir revenge tale with whodunit elements on a cattle drive to Montana, resulting in a bleak western-noir crossover with a touch of Christian morality. Former Texas policeman Shadrach Jones (Wild Bill Elliot, a legend of B-westerns) has arrived in town to find and kill the man who shot his brother in the back but has only a few clues, including a rare Derringer pistol as the weapon and the name of the hotel where his brother had stayed. After getting to know the townsfolk, Jones becomes convinced that the killer is one of the men set to join a cattle drive so accepts the job of ramrod to narrow down the suspects. Elliot is excellent as the brooding, hateful brother who ruthlessly asserts his power on the trail (“You’re not a man any longer,” he’s warned. “You’re just a ball of hate, and it’s eatin’ you up”) while Marie Windsor plays hotel-saloon owner Adelaide, the potential love interest who knows more than she’s letting on. Among the riders — and suspects — are wise old Cap MacKellar (western fixture Walter Brennan), Rod Main (Harry Morgan), Chokecherry (Rhys Williams), and Dutch (Henry Rowland), who carries and plays a gramophone set to a lively tune wherever he goes. The sets are explicitly studio-bound, aside from occasional panoramic vistas and impressive stampede footage, but this adds a claustrophobic intimacy that helps maintain tension. Appreciate the pristine noir aesthetics of the opening scene in which Jones is digging in a graveyard amidst a thunderstorm.