Hey, That Dynamite Doesn't Belong There!--Part 2

Hangman's Knot (1952) has a great plot. In 1865, a band of Confederate guerillas operating in Nevada ambush a Union gold wagon, with the intention of getting the gold to the Confederate government. They kill a dozen Union soldiers, though they lose a few men themselves, and get the gold.

The trouble is they don't find out that the war has been over for a month until after they kill the soldiers and steal the gold. Suddenly, they aren't soldiers carrying out a legitimate mission. They are outlaws and murderers.

Soon, they have a posse on their trail. This would be bad enough. But this posse isn't made up of lawmen. It's just a band of drifters that want the gold for themselves and aren't that particular about killing anyone who is in their way.

It really is a neat premise for a movie--dropping the protagonists into a moral quagmire where there doesn't seem to be a right thing to do and where the odds of surviving are low no matter what they do.

Eventually, they end up in a stagecoach way station, holding a quartet of people hostages while the posse, which is largely uninterested in the safety of the hostages, besieges them. One of his men is already a prisoner of the posse and another is wounded. The situation is made more uncomfortable by the fact that one of the hostages is the mother of one of the soldiers killed when the gold wagon was ambushed. 

Randoph Scott plays the leader of the Rebs, who has to deal with both internal and external threats. One of his men, played by Lee Marvin in that subtly threatening manner he could so thoroughly adapt, is a bit too willing to kill and a bit too attracted to one of the hostages---a pretty ex-Army nurse (Donna Reed).

Both Scott and Marvin really stand out in this movie, with Scott bringing an aura of intelligence and authority to his role. But the rest of the cast also adds to the film. Every person we meet--Rebs, hostages and posse members, have individual personalities and help draw us into the story. Both the writer (Roy Huggins, who also directed) and the cast (which includes Jeanette Nolan and Richard Denning) do their jobs well. 

The bulk of the movie is built around the siege in the way station, with Scott and the posse's leader playing cat and mouse with each other.

The movie isn't perfect. Scott and Donna Reed, for instance, end up falling in love for no other reason than story conventions require them to do so. But most of the character interactions are believable, the tension is high and the action set pieces are exciting.

But, well, I just GOTTA complain about the dynamite, which the Rebs use when ambushing the Union soldiers and use again at one point during the siege. As with the film we looked at last week, this is an anachronism. As I explained when I whined about this last week, I don't normally worry about anachronisms when I watch Westerns. I realize that sometimes the weapons used won't match up with the time period being depicted, but that it will still look "right" when viewed as a part of the mythic Wild West. But using dynamite (as well as Winchester Rifles) in stories set before or during the Civil War just feel wrong to me. It's would be like seeing someone using an M-16 rifle in a World War II movie. It's just a little too obviously wrong. 

Well, I still liked both Kansas Pacific and Hangsman's Knot, with the latter film being the superior of the two. So I suppose I just to let it go. Just let it go and hopefully the images of Confederate soldiers using dynamite two years before it was invented will eventually fade from my nightmares.