The Walking Hills

The last film in Criterion's Western Noir series I'm looking at is The Walking Hills, directed by John Sturges, released in 1949. It's a taut examination of a theme that is prevalent in both Westerns and noir: greed.

It's unusual in that it is set in the contemporary West, at least contemporary to 1949. It was a bit jarring to see a Western with cars. The action starts in a border town, when a detective (John Ireland) follows a suspect (William Bishop) into Mexico. This leads him to a poker game in a saloon. An old-timer (Edgar Buchanan) is talking about a wagon train carrying gold disappearing in the Walking Hills, sandy mountains north of the border, almost 100 years earlier. A young man (Jerome Courtland) off-handedly mentions his horse tripped over an old wagon wheel in the same area. All at the table realize the import of what he has said, and go off looking for the treasure, swearing each other to secrecy.

The other men are a horse trader (Randolph Scott) and a drifter (Arthur Kennedy), the bartender, and a singer (Josh White). None of them trusts the other. They are joined by a woman (Ella Raines) and dig to find the wagons.

Ireland is after Bishop, but Courtland and Kennedy are also fugitives, and think he's after them. But the promise of millions in gold push aside any other concern. It turns out that Raines is part of a love triangle with Scott and Bishop, so there's a lot going on in a compact film of about 75 minutes.

At the climax a sandstorm whips up, and this is done very well--you can almost feel the sand going up your nose. Needless to say a few people don't make it out alive.

Sturges directs with a firm hand and the acting is uniformly excellent. The Walking Hills is like the old saying about scorpions in a bottle. Mostly we see the dark side of human behavior, but goodness will out.