User Reviews

Fred MacMurray doesn't really have the face for an outlaw, nor the voice, which makes it difficult to picture him in a Western. However in "Face Of A Fugitive", he fares much better than he did in "The Oregon Trail" from the same year. The unshaven look and casting as a loner adds to the appeal of his character Jim Larsen, who takes on the masquerade of a mine inspector looking for a change. Trouble finds him after escaping arrest from a territorial marshal, but the brother who helped him winds up dead, and things get even more complicated when circumstances find him siding with a lawman against Reed Williams (Alan Baxter), a rancher who intends to fence his range land in violation of a government order. Wouldn't you know it, sheriff Mark Riley (Lin McCarthy) has a widowed sister (Dorothy Green) who falls for Larsen/Kincaid, and the feeling is mutual. It's the typical recipe for trouble.

You know, I had to stop and think about the value of merchandise as presented in the story. Larsen paid eighteen dollars for a gun belt and firearm, but only five dollars for a pair of pants and a jacket. Perhaps it was meant to indicate that protection had it's price in the old West, but I wonder if the numbers were accurate; I'll have to dig up an 1880's Sears catalog.

The action takes place in a Wyoming town called Tangle Blue, which is one of the coolest sounding place names I've come across in a Western, and there are plenty. I wonder if that might have been the inspiration for Bob Dylan's song "Tangled Up In Blue"? Nah, I doubt it.

You'll probably have to look long and hard for another story where the outlaw on the run needs to get as creative in dispatching a dead body. With no alternative, Larsen bundles up brother Jim in a canvas mail sack and heaves him off a train as it heads over a river crossing. Somehow you just knew that it wasn't the last you'd see of the young outlaw, he washes up ashore some time later, and for Larsen/Kincaid, it arrived with postage due. By the time it's all over, the Williams gang is no match for reluctant outlaw Larsen in a creative shoot out, leaving sheriff Riley a tough time matching up the face with the wanted poster.

Face of the Fugitive posits the existence of a criminal who isn't such a bad guy at all. This is even though a sheriff's deputy is shot to death while the criminal makes his escape.

The criminal in question is Jim Larsen played by a 50-year-old Fred MacMurray known to most as the TV father in My Three Sons a few years later.

Jim is a bank robber who is about to be sent to prison on a five to ten stretch when he manages to overcome the deputy while handcuffed as they board a train. But then Jim's brother Danny (Ron Hayes) makes an unannounced appearance and completely screws things up by attempting to aid his brother who has already wriggled out of his handcuffs and subdued the deputy.

Not only is the deputy killed but Danny is mortally wounded, expiring shortly after Jim manages to jump inside the baggage car of another train with his brother. Before Danny passes away, Jim expresses some regret for his past bad choices in life and is devastated when his brother dies.

Most criminals are not good people and have little or no regret for past misdeeds-but here we're asked to believe in the essential goodness of this man who now faces charges of felony murder.

You know that such a character will pay for his crimes in the end but the twist in Face of the Fugitive is that the protagonist gets a chance to redeem himself.

"Face" is a neat compact story in which Jim aids a greenhorn "by-the-book" sheriff Mark Riley (Lin McCarthy) who is bent on stopping wealthy landowner Reed Williams (Alan Baxter) from claiming that he owns free range government land.

The conflict between Riley and Williams is palpable throughout and builds to an exciting climax in which Jim kills Williams along with his associate Purdy (a young James Coburn) and some of his other men. In the process Jim is seriously wounded and although we learn that he will be going to prison, Riley makes it clear that he will testify on his behalf.

There is a subplot in which Jim romances Riley's sister, Ellen Bailey (Dorothy Green), a widow who has an eight-year-old daughter, but that part of the story is pretty underdeveloped (where can it go since Jim is a wanted criminal with a bounty over his head?).

MacMurray is a little too old for the part but acquits himself well. McCarthy is excellent as the idealistic sheriff and both Williams and Coburn hone their craft providing convincing sinister demeanors for the antagonists.

Based on a short story, Face of a Fugitive reflects the short length of its source material. The film is a thoughtful meditation on redemption providing a good deal of suspense along the way.

**SPOILERS** Interesting western about a hardener bank robber Jim Larsen, Fred MacMurray, who has a sudden change of life after a aborted escape that cost the deputy sheriff's, who was escorting him to prison, George Allison, Francis De Sales, life. This never would have happened, Allison's death, if it wasn't for Jim's kid brother Danny, Ron Hayes, who just happened to show up from out of nowhere with a couple of horses and cash to help his big brother escape. As if Jim really needed him to be there in the first place!

Shot and seriously wounded during the shootout Danny becomes a drag in Jim's escape attempt and when he finally expires, from his gunshot wound, Jim in his trying to get the wounded man to a doctor had lost all chance of escaping. In that all the roads leading out of the territory had been sealed off by the posse thats tracking him down!

Knowing that he's now stuck with nowhere to go Jim decides to take on a new identity and blend in with the local population, at the town of Tangle Blue, as the friendly and likable, something that people in that profession are not at all noted for, mine inspector Ray Kincaid. This sham on Jim's part does work for a while until he get's romantically involved with the town's newly installed lawman Sheriff Riley's, Lin McCarthy, widowed sister Ellen, Dorothy Green. It's then that Jim is forced to take sides in taking on this crazed and unpredictable, in just what outrageous act he's going to do next, landowner Reed Williams, Alan Baxter. The land that Williams claims he owns is in fact owned by the US Government yet still the land obsessed Williams threatens to shoot anyone-even Sheriff Riley-who as much as dares, by taking down the barbwire fence he has surrounding it, to enforce the law!

Fred MacMurray is as good as ever as hunted fugitive Jim Larsen who realizes that the life of crime that he's been leading will only lead him into an early grave like it did his kid brother Danny. Jim also knows that sooner or later he'll have to pay for his crimes and that running away form them will only makes things even worse! Like committing a new slew of crimes, like in the killing of Deputy Sheriff Allison, in his trying to escape from the long arm of the law.

***SPOILERS*** It's when Jim decided to go straight in him preventing Sheriff Riley from being murdered by Williams and his band of murderous cut throats that in a way cleared the books on all the crimes he committed up until then. But only with the sheriff his sister Ellen and the grateful people of Tangle Blue not with those who ended up being victimized, in Jim's string of train and bank robberies, by him.

If you had to pick out a single film to represent the less-than-A features Hollywood was grinding out in the 1950s, this might do the job. It practically defines "routine." It is inexpensively made on one or two Western ranches established only for use in cheap movies, it has no recognizable stars except the fading Fred MacMurray. The script, while not uninteresting, is strictly functional and lacks grace.

The photography and direction do no more than get the job done, nor does the score by Jerry Goldsmith, still operating within strictures imposed by commercial considerations. Imagine if Goldsmith had written a musical score built around a trumpet and some plucked piano strings, as he did later for "Chinatown". He'd have had all the time in the world after that to sit down and write the Great American Symphony.

The film isn't an insult to the intelligence though. MacMurray tries to help his reckless younger brother to escape and the brother kills a sheriff and is killed himself in return. MacMurray, heretofore a nice guy, is now involved in a murder. He manages to escape from the town and find a new place, where he makes acquaintances, assumes a new identity, and nervously awaits the arrival of the "Wanted" posters that will reveal him for who he is. He helps the clean-cut local sheriff out of a jam, gets the girl, and redeems himself.

The characters have some complexity built into them. The bad guy, for instance, is Alan Baxter. He has possession of some grazing land that belongs to the public and he keeps fencing it off, despite the dire warnings of good-guy sheriff Francis De Sales. That's "bad", true, but Baxter himself has no desire to kill the sheriff unless it's absolutely necessary. And he's related to MacMurray's new girl friend, so allegiances aren't simply lined up, one side against the other, as on a checker board.

But, aside from the main question of how MacMurray is ever going to recapture his virtue -- there's never much question about whether he WILL or not -- the script looks like an outline for a story. Absolutely nothing happens that doesn't advance the plot.

I'll give one example of how simple it would have been to raise this story beyond the plodding. It involves Alan Baxter, the chief heavy. Baxter had a decent career in smaller roles but he was never a bravura actor and didn't show much in the way of range. Yet, in Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur" he played a well-mannered Nazi spy who has an extraordinary conversation with hero Robert Cummings in the back seat of a car. It's all very casual. Baxter tells Cummings about his son. He would like to raise him with long hair. When he, Baxter, was a child, he had long golden curls and he wonders about grooming his own child the same way. ("You'd be doing the kid a favor to get him a haircut", replies the all-American hero.) The exchange lasts about one minute but humanizes the villain. It tells us of his weaknesses, his misguided fantasies, his childhood, and his love for his son.

There is nothing here that even resembles that moment. MacMurray, for whatever reason, slogs through his role in monotones, has the requisite fist fight in a bar, severs a strand of barbed wire with a shot from fifty feet away, crawls blooded through the dusty saloon of an abandoned town, and so on. None of the actors outperform MacMurray though. The performances are all routine. The whole production is routine.

Although Fred MacMurray said he never was comfortable in westerns he gives a pretty good account of himself in the title role in Face Of A Fugitive.

As this opens MacMurray is being transported to jail, but his brother Ron Hayes busts him out and in the process the Marshal doing the escorting and Hayes both wind up dead. MacMurray manages to hop a freight train that takes him miles from the escape and a chance to create a new identity.

Probably it would have been better to just keep going, but MacMurray intervenes in a dispute with the local Ponderosa owner Alan Baxter and inexperienced sheriff Lin McCarthy. Part of it is McCarthy's pretty sister Dorothy Green.

Part of it is Baxter is a really vicious bully who has fenced off a large piece of government land for his own use. McCarthy keeps cutting the wire and Baxter retaliates.

Baxter's foreman is played by James Coburn in one of his earliest roles. In those days I recall seeing Coburn on a whole slew of TV westerns playing all kinds of villains. His role is very typical of what I would see on television.

MacMurray does well by the part as a troubled man who looks back on his life with many regrets. The climax is a High Noon type shootout with Baxter, Coburn, and a few others. But in this case it's rather obvious that this was an afterthought ending and the original had MacMurray dying. It would have made for a better film.

Still Face Of A Fugitive is pretty good as is.

*Plot analyzed*

Face of a Fugitive (1959) is a nice little Western with the more than reliable Fred MacMurray. I like him in Film-Noirs (Double Indemnity (1944), Pushover (1954) and Westerns (Quantez (1957), Good Day for a Hanging (1959).

Here he plays an outlaw, who isn't as bad as he seems. He makes an escape from a train with the unwanted aid of his brother, who gets shot and later dies. Also, the lawman was killed. So Fred MacMurray is on the run.

Jim Larsen, alias Ray Kincaid (Fred MacMurray) hops on a train to the next town, where he befriends the sheriff and his sister. He's drawn into their world and even stands up for the sheriff (Lin McCarthy), who's engaged with a dispute with a cattle man, Reed Williams (Alan Baxter). Look for a young James Coburn as one of his henchmen. He's in a ridiculous scene where Jim Larsen, alias Ray Kincaid (Fred MacMurray) shoots a barbwire fence and it wraps around him tightly.

Most of the action takes place in the small town, but still, it's a solid script and tight role for the likable Fred MacMurray.

"Face of a Fugitive" is one of those rare little gems that help define the American Western. It's theme of redemption through sacrifice is one harking back to the earliest days of the genre. A man calling himself Ray Kincaid arrives in town on his way to the Mexican border. His stay is marked by run-ins with both the law and a violent cattle baron, as well as by an affair with an engaging widow. The climax witnesses the transformation of the hero from fugitive to savior as he essentially gives up his freedom to save the life a friend. Craggy-faced Fred MacMurray is superb in the title role. And watch for good supporting performances by Ron Hayes and James Coburn. A thorougly enjoyable little oater.