Horizons West

Still apprentice work, so don't expect anything quite so stylishly spare as the Boetticher-Randolph Scott cycle from this Western about two brothers returning to Texas after the Civil War, one to get rich quick by cattle rustling and terrorisation, the other to become his nemesis as town marshal. Burt Kennedy's superb scripting was probably the decisive factor in those later movies; here, despite impressive patches, the script by Louis Stevens too often settles for crude routine, while Hudson makes a slightly laborious meal of the good brother. But Ryan's performance as the gangster-tycoon reverberates in a manner that sometimes anticipates Boetticher's classic The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.