Bad Men of Tombstone

“There’s one thing around here that’s rare and claims a high price. Let’s call it virtue.” Kurt Neumann’s Bad Men of Tombstone is unusual among 40’s westerns in that there’s no hero to root for: just about every character is rotten, which, along with some brilliant low-key cinematography and shadowy atmosphere, solidly qualifies it as a noir crossover. The film convincingly evokes the good and bad of the pioneering spirit that spread throughout the American Old West, spotlighting not the hopeful forty-niners who dug for gold in the mountains but the shady characters who saw manifest destiny as an anarchic playground where they could take advantage of lawlessness to get rich quick (“Every new town was hostile territory,” says the third-party narrator. “Behind every unfamiliar door lurked the threat of sudden death”). The bad actors of our story are ambitious drifter Tom Horn (Barry Sullivan) and gang leader William Morgan (Broderick Crawford), brought together by criminal circumstances (the sequence where they encounter one another in a town jail cell is pure noir artistry); after Morgan’s fellow bandits break them both out of jail, Horn convinces Morgan that they can get richer by working together, so the gang takes off for Leadville, Colorado, a wildly wealthy town enjoying the profits of silver mining, and, later, Tombstone, the famous refuge for outlaws in Arizona. They rob banks, derail trains, and murder countless men, all for the sake of accumulating wealth, which Horn hopes will set him up nicely in the Oz-like San Francisco he’s heard so much about, along with his fiancée Julie (Marjorie Reynolds), a woman of dubious scruples he picks up along the way. The film is low in budget but high in entertainment value, Neumann and cinematographer Harlan incorporating unique camera angles and dynamic motion to keep things moving swiftly. The final shot is a poignant one: a wholesome, optimistic young family passes by in a stagecoach discussing the bountiful treasures that await them further west while our main character’s corpse lies just a few feet away.