Rancho Notorious

The old Lang story of Hate, Murder and Revenge...this time in the form of his last and most unusual Western. Arthur Kennedy, obsessed with avenging his murdered fiancée, falls in with gunslinger Ferrer and crime queen Dietrich, and gradually, inexorably, becomes indistinguishable from the men he was hunting. The fateful moral, the complete avoidance of naturalism, and the integration of an ongoing ballad into the plot, all make the movie quintessential Lang; add an overt political stance and it would be quintessentially Brechtian too.