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This originally-filmed 3-D pot boiler features a darkly gorgeous Donna Reed partnering an equally handsome Rock Hudson- the latter displaying the macho charisma he hid behind for most of his career. But the thing is, he's good -and so's Donna. They play an engaged couple about to settle in California at the end of the Civil War. Rock has the odd good line 'Bullets are democratic- they don't only kill badmen' -no doubt an orphan from scriptwriter Kathleen George's novel TEN AGAINST CEASAR on which movie was based and a concept which would have found an echo in post-Korean and WWII veteran audiences.Ex-Confederate Army cronies' embitterment and discontent is the excuse for stagecoach robbery, murder and kidnapping. Ben Warren [Hudson] is left for dead and his fiancé Jennifer Ballard [Reed] snatched under the unlikely pretext that gang leader Frank Slayton [Phil Carey] fancies her. The later elemental suggestion of suppressed carnality is best left as it was -suppressed. Donna Reed, despite torn blouse -is Rock's girl, and she remains so. Doesn't the Phil Carey know how things in Westerns work out? The plot of George's novel, TEN AGAINST CAESAR has been uncomplicated to a degree where an orangutan, given five seconds and a paintbrush, could have written the subsequence and denouement.But credibility is not what this movie is all about.It's about how parted Rock and Donna are re-united and triumph over -albeit manufactured -adversity ; it's about searing Arizona desert; the magnificence of 1950 Technicolor Western-making, and perhaps most of all about the making of desolation beautiful. I remember its flat screen release as a kid, was dying to see it but couldn't afford the admission. Had I seen it then I know how I would have reacted - I would have considered it good value and left the cinema, six-gun at the ready, seeking a showdown.
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