Vincent Price spends decades in perfecting a scheme to claim much of Arizona and large parts of New Mexico via forged Spanish land grants.
It's Samuel Fuller's fanciful and romantic version of real events in 19th-Century Arizona. There was a real James Reavis, and he led a fanciful life, fighting, like Flashman, on both sides during the American Civil War. He did make the claims and so well-done were his forgeries that the US Government considered paying him one hundred million dollars (the equivalent of more than three billion dollars in modern buying power). He spent two years in prison and died in 1914 at the age of 71, four years after Arizona had become a state.
It's an ambitious and well-done movie for Lippert, and arguably the best movie they ever produced. There's lots of excellent talent on view, including Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, and Beulah Bondi, as well as camerawork by James Wong Howe. It's slow to get started as we watch Price, shorn of his interesting past, as he goes about his forgery. Then he returns to Arizona and the action and vistas open up, as well as the romantic side of Fuller's version of the story. Fuller has the newspaperman's viewpoint of setting up the story well, with the lede in the movie's title, and the fabulist's attitude of making it race.
Price said this was his second favorite of all his roles. I agree. He said his favorite was his role in LAURA. My favorite is in HIS KIND OF WOMAN. He certainly gets some good moments here, confessing his forgeries, and with a rope around his neck.
It's Samuel Fuller's fanciful and romantic version of real events in 19th-Century Arizona. There was a real James Reavis, and he led a fanciful life, fighting, like Flashman, on both sides during the American Civil War. He did make the claims and so well-done were his forgeries that the US Government considered paying him one hundred million dollars (the equivalent of more than three billion dollars in modern buying power). He spent two years in prison and died in 1914 at the age of 71, four years after Arizona had become a state.
It's an ambitious and well-done movie for Lippert, and arguably the best movie they ever produced. There's lots of excellent talent on view, including Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, and Beulah Bondi, as well as camerawork by James Wong Howe. It's slow to get started as we watch Price, shorn of his interesting past, as he goes about his forgery. Then he returns to Arizona and the action and vistas open up, as well as the romantic side of Fuller's version of the story. Fuller has the newspaperman's viewpoint of setting up the story well, with the lede in the movie's title, and the fabulist's attitude of making it race.
Price said this was his second favorite of all his roles. I agree. He said his favorite was his role in LAURA. My favorite is in HIS KIND OF WOMAN. He certainly gets some good moments here, confessing his forgeries, and with a rope around his neck.