A Day of Fury. 1956. USA. Directed by Harmon Jones. Screenplay by James Edmiston, Oscar Brodney, based on a story by James Edmiston. With Dale Robertson, Jock Mahoney, Mara Corday, John Dehner, Jan Merlin, Carl Benton Reid. DCP. 78 min.
One of the stranger entries in Universal-International’s Western cycle, A Day of Fury belongs to a small group of 1950s films (No Name on the Bullet is the better-known example) that use a gunfighter’s arrival in a respectable town as a kind of social acid test—a genre anticipation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. Jagade (Dale Robertson) saves the life of Marshal Alan Burnett (Jock Mahoney) on the trail, then follows him into town and proceeds to do nothing technically illegal while systematically dismantling the moral architecture the townspeople have built around him. Harmon Jones, who made his reputation as an editor at Fox before moving to the director’s chair, keeps the camera working in a mostly confined space: saloon, church, dusty streets, and a handful of interiors.
Robertson plays Jagade with a coiled, sardonic quality—a man who understands exactly what he’s doing and why, and is troubled by that understanding. Genre stalwart John Dehner is a preacher who turns mob orator, while Dee Carroll is a schoolteacher whose humiliation is the film’s cruelest scene. The moral framework nominally favors civilization over the old frontier lawlessness, but Jones doesn’t let the town off easily. The hypocrites are the first to reach for torches.