The Last Sunset. 1961. USA. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, based on the novel Sundown at Crazy Horse by Howard Rigsby. With Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone, Joseph Cotten, Carol Lynley, Jack Elam. 35mm. 112 min.
The Last Sunset is the only pairing of Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson, and Hudson also produced, through his Bryna company, which accounts for some of the tension both in front of and behind the camera. Robert Aldrich, who said the production was among the most unpleasant of his career, nevertheless brought along his regular cinematographer Ernest Laszlo and editor Michael Luciano, and the film certainly looks handsome. Laszlo shoots the Aguascalientes locations in Eastmancolor with the muted warmth of a painting done partly in shadow, the landscape dwarfing the very elaborate human drama playing out across it. Dalton Trumbo’s script, commissioned after Douglas helped him escape the blacklist with Spartacus, loads a conventional cattle-drive structure with psychological freight—obsession, guilt, and a concealed family relationship that gives the melodrama a shade of Greek tragedy.
Douglas plays Brendan O’Malley, a gunfighter in flight across the Mexican border, pursued by lawman Dana Stribling (Hudson) for a killing that turns out to have its own complicated history. Douglas gets the livelier role and plays it with a performer’s frank enjoyment of his own charm, while Hudson works in a narrower register—steadier, more contained, and, ultimately, more effective. The film’s production troubles are legible in its unevenness, but the premise generates genuine suspense, and the final scene earns the weight Trumbo and Aldrich placed on it.