Cast a Long Shadow

This Audie Murphy Western starts out from a halfway interesting place. Matt (Murphy) learns he's inherited a massive cattle ranch. This comes as quite a surprise, since Matt despised the deceased, who he believed to be his father, and who treated his mother (who was probably a sex worker) very poorly. So when the man who delivers the news, the top hand at the ranch, says he and the other employees will pay Matt 20 grand to sell it so they can all have a share and be their own bosses, Matt jumps at the chance.

(The movie came out in 1959, and you can tell because it frames the idea of the workers being their own bosses and running things as a bad idea. That they aren't responsible enough to do it properly, and will just use it as an excuse to drink and party, rather than work. Also that the ones who own a 1/40th share are going to lord that over the ones with a 1/50th and so on. Nope, the only way it can succeed is with one strong, capitalist boss to keep all these bums in line. Collective ownership is a pipe dream according to this movie.)

But he's got to return to the ranch to get the money and sign the paperwork, which bring him into contact with his old flame (good), and all the other people there (mostly bad), who also look down on him because of his mother's profession and lack of a last name. (Although he's constantly referred to as "Matt Brown", but I guess a surname you give yourself doesn't count? And his mother's wouldn't either?)

The jeering of a bunch of slack-jawed, drunken hicks convinces Matt that he'll run the ranch after all. Except he's got one week to do a massive, rapid-march cattle drive or the bank will own the ranch. He doesn't do himself any favors by adopting what he thinks are his deceased father's management methods, firing people at the smallest infraction or defiance to make himself appear big. He alienates some of his few supporters, including his lady, and ends up with a quartet of dumbasses determined to ruin the cattle drive and kill him.

There's something there, in the unresolved daddy issues, that for all his anger towards the deceased, he can't envision running things any differently than he thinks the old man did. That he's gone from directing all his anger and bitterness inward, to sending it outward, now that he has a position of authority to act from.

Problem being, the movie just sputters out. The quartet make their attempt, it fails, with one of them finding his conscience at the last second. Matt learns the truth about his father, they reach Santa Fe. But the two survivors of the foursome just ride off, with no follow-up. The cattle made it, so I guess we assume he saved the ranch and patched things up with Janet, but there's no follow-up there either. The one of the quartet that changed sides was angry initially because he felt he got fired unfairly, and he was going to have to move his wife and children. Now he's dead. How's Matt going to explain that to the widow? How's that going to play out?

It just ends incredibly quickly after the murder attempt fails. Matt never confronts them, or is even aware they were after him. I guess because the war inside himself was more important than what these four did, but it's like the people making the movie got bored, or ran out of time.