The Violent Men (1955)

Glenn Ford plays a small-scale rancher (John Parrish) who came out west to recover from his civil war injuries, and is planning to sell up and return to the east with his fiancée. The valley he lives in is controlled by a ruthless cattle baron – the only man who has the money to buy him out, but also someone who he (Parrish)'s uncomfortable selling too, especially after seeing the Sheriff murdered by the cattle baron's henchman. Parrish changes his mind about selling pretty much every scene at the start of the film, usually to contradict whoever's advising him.

In the cattle-baron (Wilkinson)'s home, there's some feuding going on. His controlling wife (Barbara Stanwyck) wants has brought in his brother, nominally for his hard-line approach to land acquisition, but also for a bit of secret rumpy-pumpy. The daughter has set her cap (not overly obviously, but quite predictably) on Parrish, and also knows about her month's infidelity.

Following the murder of one of Parrish's hired hands things get violent...

I really enjoyed this one. It had all the clichés you hope for in a "cattle-baron" western: the family feuding, the rebellious daughter, the man struggling with his failing health (c.f. "The Man from Laramie"; I wondered also the villain here was the inspiration for Mortimer in "Once Upon a Time in the West"), the big dreams of expansion, the speeches about having cleared the land of Indian's in the early days. Hardy's Encyclopedia of Westerns was less kind, describing it as a "hand-me-down version of Jubal" (which came out the following year). Jubal probably is more substantial, but this is still excellent entertainment.

The weaknesses are probably the romance—much as that's often best minimised in the Western—since Parrish's fiancée largely disappears at the half-way point and his romance with Wilkinson's daughter is introduced a bit quickly at the end, and the consequences of the hero's violence. The latter is particularly important: at one point Parrish burns down the Wilkinsons' ranch—vengeance for the burning of his own ranch—but it still feels like he's crossed a line in protecting himself and other small ranches to seeking outright bloodshed. This is never really explored further though, and seems to be largely let off by the finale.

There appears to be a DVD of reasonable quality; I saw a TV recording of similar looking quality.