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José Gomez (Tomas Milian) is a no-good bandit & killer who is brought to
the prison of Yuma, where his execution awaits him, but nevertheless he is
freed with the help of his girlfriend ,good girl Eden (ilya Karin).
Luke Chilson (Richard Wyler) is a bouty hunter, on Gomez' trail, yet when he
visits the little settlement where Jeannie lives with her uncle Ernest, ex-sheriff of Santa Fe, & where he thinks Gomez will pop up eventually, he is
met with distrust from the settlers, who know Gomez since childhood &
figure he is basically a good, if a little wild, boy.
Soon Gomez shows up too, & he & Chilson have a shoot- &
duke-out, until Chilson can finally make Gomez his prisoner ... but when he
wants to take him to the next sheriff, Gomez manages to take advantage of a
moment of carelessness, trick Chilson & beat him up good ... all before the
eyes of the entire settlement.
Then he ties him up in the nearby stables, & noone seems to care much
... until a bunch of Gomez' friends arrive, & they prove to be a rude bunch
& soon start terrorizing the whole settlement.
The settlers start having doubts if it was right to side with Gomez &
tie up Chilson, but nobody musters up enough courage to free Chilson.
Then though the bandits plan to rob the settklements provisions, & of
all people only Eden has the dourage to cut Chilson loose, who has since been
tortured severely by Gomez & his men ...
With chilson gone, the gang starts to panic, & everybody blames Gomez
for not having him shot sooner ... which in trms leads Gomze to shoot one of
his own men to prove his supremacy.
Without any success, Gomez' men search for Chilson in the surrounding area,
but Chilson comes back into the settlement voluntarily ... with the provisions
wagon as a Trojan horse ... & of course in a final shoot-out he can get rid
off all the bandits.
A very interesting Western that pretty much turns all the usual Western
clichés topsy turvy by presenting multi-layered characterisations of its main
characters not usually found in (Euro-)Westerns of its time: while the
bounty-killer, who basically represents the law in this movie (if on a very
crude level) comes off as a complete asshole, terrorizing the settlers to
attain his own goals, the bandit, who is seen killing a bunch of people, seems
like a rather likeable character, who might be flawed, but essentially
good-natured, & the good girl is essentially the bandit/killer's accomplice
till very late in the movie, while the old lawman hardly ever sees any reason
to take any action at all - & when he finally sides with the forces of good
(meaning - in an ambivalent way - Chilson) he is shot dead for his efforts.
That the movie boasts great camerawork, brisk pacing & action aplenty
doesn't hurt the film either of course.
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