Star in the Dust. 1956. USA. Directed by Charles F. Haas. Screenplay by Oscar Brodney, based on the novel Man with a Brand by Lee Leighton. With John Agar, Mamie Van Doren, Richard Boone, Coleen Gray. DCP. 80 min.
This ticking-clock Western bears the influence of High Noon, though with the moral certainty drained out: A convicted killer is scheduled to hang at sundown, the town casino is offering eight-to-three he won’t make it, and the sheriff has to hold the line against cattlemen who want him freed and farmers who want him lynched before he can talk. Charles Haas was a contract director without a distinctive style, but the tight construction of Oscar Brodney’s script and John L. Russell’s sun-bleached Technicolor photography do most of the necessary work, while the Lone Pine locations give the procedural a convincing geography of entrapment.
Richard Boone plays the condemned man with a sardonic patience that gives the film something to push against. He’s clearly guilty, clearly knows things, and has no interest in making anyone’s morning easier. The political geometry is more complicated than the format usually permits: the cattlemen hired him, the farmers want his employers exposed, and John Agar’s sheriff—whose future brother-in-law is a leading suspect—has to hold together a legal process nobody in town actually believes in. Mamie Van Doren is underused as Agar’s fiancée, though Star in the Dust was the beginning of a Haas–Van Doren working relationship that would produce three more films by 1959, all of them considerably less respectable than this one. An uncredited Clint Eastwood can be spotted in a minor role.