The New Pictures

The Fiend Who Walked the West (20th Century-Fox) is neither a science-fiction whiz-bang nor a bona fide western, but an oaty remake of Kiss of Death (1947), a spare, tautly bound story of big-city gangland retribution. In transferring it to the wide-open spaces, Producer Herbert B. Swope Jr. mused over such banal but essentially pertinent titles as Quick Draw and The Hell-Bent Kid, until one day his eyes lit on the box-office gleanings from the recent blotch of horror films (TIME, June 16). A fiend in need became The Fiend indeed. But by any name, it is a treasonable facsimile of the original.

Dan Hardy (TV's Hugh O'Brian) is a home-loving, right kind of guy who just happens to get caught holding up a bank and sent up for ten years. Considerable acreage is added to his sad lot by his cellmate (Robert Evans), a psychopathic killer ever since his five older sisters carved a rabbit on his chest and the authorities hanged his pa. Evans works off his hostility feelings by driving his Indian girl friend to suicide, pouring ground glass in a fellow prisoner's chow, and reminding O'Brian that his wife is probably cheating on him. Still, he is let free after a minimal sentence and sets about expanding his repertory. In Kiss of Death, Richard Widmark pushed an old lady downstairs in a wheelchair; Evans plugs her with an arrow. He also guns down two lawmen and breaks his mistress' neck.

Actor O'Brian eventually tracks down his man with his usual blazing Wyattack. But it is Relative Newcomer Evans, 28, a successful Manhattan clothing manufacturer before he caught on as an actor (The Sun Also Rises), who forges the picture's only solid link with its city-bred forebear: his portrayal of a psychopathic Wild West gunslinger is clearly based on observation of New York City's juvenile delinquents.

The Big Country (Anthony-Worldwide). Back in the carefree movie days of the 1920s, fledgling Director William Wyler made one western a week for a whole year. "Every Friday I would be given a new script," he recalls. "The actors were real cowboys, and the films followed a set formula: action at the beginning, a plot, and big action at the end." The formula has changed little, but everything else has changed considerably. For The Big Country, Director Wyler had a $3,000,000 budget, a year of preparation before he began shooting, five more months to film it, and a gaudy troupe of players led by Gregory Peck (also co-producer). He has not squandered his resources. Big Country is a starkly beautiful, carefully written, classic western that demands comparison with Shane.

In both Shane and High Noon, the plot tautened in one spare, straight line--the hero awaiting an unwanted showdown with an implacable enemy--and the characters tightroped their way toward their inevitable destination. The setting may have been Dry Gulch, but the town sage was Aristotle. In contrast, Wyler's panorama is as broad as his movie's title indicates, and his drama hinges not on a fate-decreed clash of incompatible forces, but on a succession of real choices to be made by each of the characters, each choice affecting the lives of all the others and creating in turn new sets of choices. The construction is taken from life, and Director Wyler, working with a bone-hard, uncluttered script by James Webb, Sy Bartlett and Robert Wilder, proves himself a master builder.

True to the old formula, the film begins with action. A gentleman from Baltimore (Gregory Peck), togged out in a sooty city suit, arrives in the Southwestern village of San Rafael to claim the hand of Pat (Carroll Baker), daughter of Rancher Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford), richest man west of the Rothschilds. Peck is barely out of the stagecoach before he is set upon by a liquored-up gang of Hannassey boys, whose father has long feuded with Terrill over water rights. But Peck's is a different code: he refuses to fight back or to show off his manhood by trying to ride a bumpy stallion.

But if hatred is poison, suggests Wyler, pacifism is not necessarily an antidote. Enraged by the Hannasseys' rough stuff, and spurred on by a foreman (Charlton Heston) who himself cottons to Carroll, Bickford's men pillage the Hannassey ranch. Reprisal bounces back on reprisal as in some brutal pingpong game, until the scattered feud pulls together into one pitched battle for control of the Big Muddy ranch, access to whose river had been warily shared by the two ranchers; now it must be held by one or the other.

The Hannasseys make their bid by kidnaping Big Muddy's owner (Jean Simmons). Peaceable Peck, tired of the bloodletting and even more tired of his bitter, Hannassey-hating fiancee, has already wooed Actress Simmons and won ownership of the river. In his last try at stemming further killing, he offers both ranchers equal access to water. When the offer is refused, the last hope of peace is destroyed, and Peck rides into the Hannasseys' canyon retreat to bring Jean out by whatever means necessary. He rides out alive, but not until after a scene as big with action--and as littered with senseless death--as any Director Wyler ever put together.

The movie's story is acted out against a landscape in which the splash of blood provides the only bright color. Photographer Franz Planer, working extensively in wide-angle long shots, has caught the muted tans, browns and faded yellows of West Texas with unsurpassed exactness--an accomplishment partly due to the fact :hat the film was shot near the Mojave Desert in Southern California, which pictorially appears more Texan than Texas. Co-Producer Peck plays the hero as if he were not so much peace-loving as merely sleepy, but Burl Ives wakes him up with a portrayal of Old Man Hannassey that has dignity, simplicity, and roars to the canyon tops. Director Wyler has earned a Friday off.

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