Beef

     Joanne Dru (1922-1996), born with the remarkable name, Joanne Letitia LaCock, had a catlike appearance to her eyes and eyebrows.  I associate her with Westerns, with tight long skirts and long-sleeved blouses with fancy ruffles.  The woman waiting for her love interest to come home from the cattle drive; giving her deadbeat gambler husband an ultimatum he fails to live up to.
     In Vengeance Valley (1951), directed by Richard Thorpe, Jen Strobie (Dru) is married to Lee Strobie (Robert Walker), a shit with a gambling problem and a talent for losing money.  Lee's foster brother, Owen Daybright (Burt Lancaster), is a ranch foreman who runs afoul of two brothers (John Ireland and Hugh O'Brian) whose sister (Sally Forrest) has given birth to a bastard child, father unknown--except to the brothers, who assume the perpetrator is Daybright.  Lee Strobie is the actual father.  The brothers, who lack discernment and jump easily to conclusions, go after Owen unsuccessfully, then make a much deadlier try later on, in league with Lee Strobie, who wants Owen's share of the ranch once his father (Ray Collins) is dead.
     It's a pretty good film, the wide open Western scenery a plus.  The cattle drive scenes show long vistas of multiple groups of cattle moving about with mountains in the background, none of the thousands of animals the result of CGI.  The relationship between Lee and Owen shows a good man and a bad man, the former staying true to the latter for as long as he can, clinging to shared boyhood memories between them and also loyal to the old man who's father to the no good shit son.
     After the resolution, and of course it gets resolved, there's a nice balance of a father's sadness and regret, with the return of Jen Strobie, about to find out from Owen what's happened to her husband.  As we're left to imagine their conversation and what may yet come between them, the movie embraces the truth to be had in a long distance shot, like we see in landscapes; places to enter in numerous spots, near in perspective or faraway towards the painting's horizon.  It's in these big landscapes where the simple but often rich plots of Westerns play out.
     
                                                                             Vic Neptune

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