Duel At Silver Creek [DVD]

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Faith Domergue was so striking and charismatic, it’s unfortunate that she never rose above B pictures. Kass remarks that Audie Murphy is “ludicrously attired in black leather, like a Western The Wild One (1953).

Despite it's obvious flaws this is a really good fun B-movie western and you'll like it if you view it as such.There are a lot of elegant tracking shots here, and the way the titular duel is shot makes it clear that director Don Siegel was really relishing getting to play around in the western sandbox. Slimy brutal villains and great characters abound in a film that sure doesn’t feel like Don Siegel’s first crack at the Wild West.

All the clichés are here but they are delivered with a slight sense of fun that helps it move smoothly. However, that doesn't make this any less enjoyable of a film because Siegel throws in a lot of shootouts and chases to make it all exciting, while the Technicolor photography is sumptuous and the story has enough twists and cool characters to make it work. Tyrone pursues the treacherous Opal Lacey ( Faith Domergue), who is secretly in league with the claim jumpers, and Cromwell falls for tomboy Dusty Fargo ( Susan Cabot) who is only interested in Lightning.During the climactic gunfight where rider Rod Lacy is himself chased on horseback by the marshal and both then dismount to continue shooting at each other, Lacy astonishingly manages to fire 11 shots from what is clearly a revolver pistol (which normally fires only 6) before an attempted 12th shot reveals it to be out of ammunition, and only then is Lacy forced to reload it - he is out of frame briefly whilst on his galloping horse (the camera cuts to the chasing marshal) but could not have conceivably re-loaded during that very short time, and at no point throughout is he shown to be carrying 2 guns. I know there hasn't been that many new releases during the pandemic, cinematic visits have been scarce, with cinemas closed for long periods of time and studios holding back films to make the most from their investment.

Leonard Goldstein, the producer, has propped this routine affair against some average Technicolor scenery, and the commotion remains as pat and unsurprising as the kicked-up dust, which, in all fairness to Don Siegel's direction, is plentiful. This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.

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