In so many of the Westerns he appeared in, Gary Cooper feels like he’s playing the same character and that’s the case here as well. Even though here he is a former outlaw who is forced to confront his old gang, the inner conflict and moral quandary are much the same as if he were the sheriff. This isn’t to say that it isn’t good because it is in fact a very solid Western. But it’s also a completely straight and stereotypical Western and its finale is a little underwhelming. I can see why it’s a classic of the genre but it’s not for me.

The middle-aged Link Jones is travelling to Fort Worth, carrying money collected from his community to hire a schoolteacher. On the train he meets fast talking businessman Sam Beasley and Billie Ellis, a saloon singer. When the train stops to pick up more wood as fuel, it is attacked by a gang of robbers. The guard on the train fights back, injuring one of the robbers, and the train departs. Link, Sam and Billie are all inadvertently left behind, far from any town. Link leads them to a dilapidated farm and finds that it is being used as the base for the same gang of robbers. He also reveals that he was once a member of this gang and the leader Dock Tobin is his uncle but he ran away long ago. The other gang members are suspicious but Dock is willing to accept Link rejoining them. To protect Billie, Link pretends that she is his woman even though he is already married with children as the outlaws are all obviously lusting after her. Dock proposes that the gang rob the bank in the town of Lassoo, which he had always wanted to do, and Link is forced to participate.

This film got off on a bit of a wrong foot to me as Link acts very suspiciously in the beginning and I wondered if he was telling the truth about simply wanting to hire a schoolteacher. Of course this turned out to be much less complicated film than I thought as it’s about a man with a criminal past having it catch up with him. Many of Link’s actions don’t make sense to me. He should have recognized the members of his old gang who attacked the train and why would he even lead the other two passengers to the old farm given what he knows about their operation. It feels like a very contrived scenario to me. Some of the other story choices feel weak to me too, such as Sam being the obvious sacrificial victim and why make Billie a saloon singer who is trained as a schoolteacher instead of just a schoolteacher? It’s like they want a bit of glamor to the character but also want her to be an innocent, decent girl. At least the outlaw characters are more interesting, with Link’s cousin Coaley being the young buck constantly challenging his position, and the older cousin Claude being fiercely loyal to Dock because he’s family while Link abandoned them.

Gary Cooper really is the best thing about this and likely the reason why Jean-Luc Godard named it his best film of the year when it was mostly ignored by everyone else. Almost all of his inner turmoil in encountering his old gang again is non-verbal, conveyed through his facial expressions and body language. It helps too that this is a grounded Western that doesn’t make Link out to be a cowboy superhero. He’s no faster or more skilled than anyone else. He’s maybe just a little more experienced and determined. Finally this film got into some trouble with the censors because Billie explicitly gets threatened with sexual assault. It makes for uncomfortable watching but also serves to tell the audience in no uncertain terms that there’s no romanticism about being outlaws at all. Not only are these morally despicable men, they’re old and useless ones too as Dock turns out to be living in the faded glories of the past as his information is completely wrong. This is black and white morality in old fashioned Western way even though Link is a reformed criminal himself.

There’s some appeal in such a traditional, serious Western made with solid production values and this may very well be Cooper’s finest performance as some have claimed. It’s very much a product of its time however and the moralizing is too flat and simple for me. The film would have been more complex if Lassoo turned out to be a big town and Link actually had to wrestle with the dilemma of warning the residents and being possibly captured as an outlaw himself. Instead it keeps things simple by making it a straight confrontation between good and evil and that’s just not that interesting to me.