Jack Slade

A film noir adaptation of Mark Twain, America’s greatest humorist? Well, kind of. Harold Schuster’s western B-noir Jack Slade is actually based on Twain’s mythologized account of real-life gunslinger Jack Slade in Roughing It, his collection of semi-autobiographical travel essays. And Slade’s life story was dark, at least the way Twain wrote it and Schuster shot it. Noir regular Mark Stevens plays the title role, an angry, alcoholic gunslinger who’s been avenging his father’s brutal murder since he was a boy (“Keep people out and your guts in”). When his violent tendencies find licit work as security for a stagecoach line, he also usurps responsibility for law enforcement in town, testing the legal limits of his rage. Dorothy Malone plays his wife, who targets him for marriage within minutes of meeting him (“You belong to me”) and then grows concerned with his mental state, and Harry Shannon plays his adoptive father and friend Tom Carter whom Slade pays back in tragic fashion. The low-budget sets and gritty B&W cinematography add to the bleakness that penetrates nearly every scene, which includes a drunken hit-and-run (on a horse), a child fatally shot at nearly point blank range, a tree hanging, and plenty of good old-fashioned shootouts.