Rawhide

2/10/2014

Desperate Siege. Rawhide is directed by Henry Hathaway and written by Dudley Nichols. It stars Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward, Hugh Marlowe, Jack Elam, George Tobias, Dean Jagger and Edgar Buchanan. Music is by Sol Kaplan and Lionel Newman and cinematography by Milton Krasner. A stagecoach station employee and a stranded woman traveller and her baby niece find themselves held hostage by four escaped convicts intending to rob the next day's gold shipment. A Western remake of 1935 crime film Show Them No Mercy, Rawhide is the embodiment of a solid Western production. Beautifully photographed in black and white by Krasner, smoothly performed by a strong cast of actors and seamlessly directed by the astute Hathaway, it builds the hostage plot slowly, tightening the screws of character

9/6/2022

**_Western noir with Tyrone Power, Susan Hayward and Hugh Marlowe_** Four outlaws take captive the residents of a way station in southern Wyoming (Power, Hayward and Edgar Buchanan) while waiting for a stage with a gold shipment. Marlowe plays the head thug while Jack Elam is on hand as his psychotic subordinate. "Rawhide" (1951) is a B&W Western that influenced future ones, like "Hangman's Knot" (1952), “The Tall T” (1956), “Day of the Outlaw” (1959), "Ride Lonesome" (1959), "Comanche Station" (1960) and "Apache Uprising" (1965). It ranks with the best of these. If you remove the opening and closing scenes, which are understandably passé, “Rawhide” holds up in the modern day as a psychological adult Western that's film noir-ish and realistic. While some people favor B&W, I don't