Passion

Made in the same year as his celebrated Silver Lode, Dwan's standard but very vivid Western is a tale of warring ranchers in southern California. Wilde is the handsome, Zorro-like cowboy who returns home to find his nearest and dearest under siege by hoodlums who want their land. With its abandoned babies and melodramatic death sequences, the storytelling may be mawkish, but as he demonstrated in his Douglas Fairbanks films of the silent era, Dwan is expert at choreographing fights and chases and keeping the tempo brisk. He's helped here by John Alton's location camerawork. The denouement, in which a vengeful Wilde pursues the killers up a snowy mountain, is so spectacularly shot that it takes a few moments to realise quite how preposterous it really is.