Two guys steal 600 grand from the Union Army, but when they see they can't both get away, they draw cards to see who gets caught. Jerry (Thomas Hunter) gets caught, and spends five years in prison. Ken gets away and becomes your typical Western ranch baron, buying up all the land and with an army of goons to intimidate everyone into doing nothing.
Of course, Ken also promised to look after Jerry's wife and son, but when Jerry returns to the old homestead, he finds it deserted, save a few things. One, his wife diary, which tells him Ken didn't keep his word, because he refused to even loan her money to pay the mortgage. Two, two guys Ken sent to kill Jerry. Three, a random guy (Dan Duryea) hanging out in the barn loft who bails Jerry out and offers to go to Ken and claim he killed Jerry. He gets a steady goon job, and Jerry has the element of surprise.
I thought that Hunter was the same guy who played "The Stranger" in Any Gun Can Play, which would not have been a ringing endorsement. He's not, but I'm not sure he's an improvement. Hunter tries, sometimes, for this uncontrolled anger, where he stumbles out of his home and screams Ken's last name like he's Shatner in Wrath of Khan. Which is actually funny, hearing him yell "SEAGULL!" in the middle of the open range of Texas. Or he laughs oddly or whips his head around to glare at someone when they ask him something. It's too much - there's a couple of times I can see Dureya wondering what the hell this guy is doing - and it's not exactly consistently portrayed.
Beyond that, the film is mostly your standard "revenge Western," where the guy is hellbent on payback, but oh no, he finds things to care about again. You know, once he's done killing that guy. There's a requisite scene where Jerry gets shoved around a circle of guys who punch him - don't know why that was such a popular trope with Italian Westerns. Actually, there's two of those, but in one he gets to fight back.
Despite his initial standoff attitude, Jerry tries to help the townspeople push back against Ken's goon army. Except, in one of the film's quirks that nonetheless fails to elevate it above mediocre, the attempt fails, and the town is abandoned by the time the final gunfight (though it's less a gunfight than Hunter and Duryea chucking dynamite all over the place) begins. His help attempt fails because the tavern singer - who's only been in one scene so far - turns out to be in love with the chief goon (who is sort of the stereotypical cheerful psychopath.) So she intercepts Jerry's warning and alerts the goon.
The goon's also in love (or lust, more likely) with Ken's sister, who just so happens to have the same name as Jerry's deceased wife. At first, I thought she was Jerry's wife, who married Ken after he told her Jerry was dead. Then Ken referred to her as his sister, and I thought Jerry married his pal's sis. But no, she just has the same name so there can be a scene where she meets Jerry because he called out to his wife while delirious after fist-fighting 9 guys.
The movie either sets a lot of things up it doesn't do much to pay off, or lets things hang for the entire film, then remembers at the last second, 'oh yeah, we should probably explain that.' There's some stuff with Jerry's son that falls in the first category, and the reason Duryea's character keeps helping Jerry falls in the latter.
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