Silver Lode1954

7-3-2013 -- I was tipped off to this film by a capsule review in this week's New Yorker, prompted by showings today and on July 6th at MOMA. Don't let the silly trailer fool you: this movie is a McCarthy era witch hunt allegory, and very well made, including a magnificent tracking shot that has to be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, Fandor's VCI-sourced print is a stinker, I hope that MOMA has a better one, as Silver Lode seserves it.

White hot paranoia in the Old West, fast-paced and entertaining. As 1950s sci-fi films dealt metaphorically with the A-bomb, some western films dealt with McCarthy's Communist witch hunts. HIGH NOON is the famous one, JOHNNY GUITAR is the weird one and the low-budget SILVER LODE is the simplest and most explicit one. If its spartan plot of a man who becomes a pariah when he's wrongfully accused of crimes by a shady US Marshal isn't quite enough to put its message across, how about the fact the Marshal is named McCarty? And how about the fact that the film is set on the 4th of July so that the whole town is festooned in patriotic banners? There's a flag on display in nearly every single exterior shot. Seasoned B-movie director Allan Dwan beats us black and blue with the red, white and blue. This is not just a story about the Old West, he wants you to know--it's a story about America. By the end of the film, even the local prostitute wears a gown made up of the colors of the flag.

Written by unsung female leftist screenwriter Karen DeWolf, author of over fifty films, Silver Lode is an allegory for the McCarthy-ism and blacklisting of the 1950's, but is even more meaningful in 2017. A crooked liar comes to a Western town that is festooned with American flags for the 4th of July, and subverts justice by falsely accusing an innocent man of crimes he himself has committed. How easy is it to turn a man's friends and neighbors against him? Today's audience might find this even more convincing than the audiences of 1954. Directed by the great Alan Dwan, inventor of the crane shot and other bits of cinematic language, Silver Lode is really something to behold, more than the sum of its parts. And it has to be Dolores Moran's finest hour.

A very good Western movie with so much application to real world scenarios even today. This movie shows how tenuous a person's word was back then and it is an even greater problem now.

If it is an allegory for McCarthyism, it is a superficial one. The “leftism” of the film feels more like the self-congratulatory liberalism typical of the imperialist core. American anti-communism is ultimately considered an aberration of "American democratic values" (the plot hinges on whether or not McCarty is a legitimate US Marshal) rather than its logical consummation, and it understands the impact of this aberration only in relation to the upstanding white American. This it shares with Jay Roach’s Trumbo, another deeply flawed attempt at Hollywood capital writing its own history.

The performances are serviceable, and scenes can unfold with a certain ominous inevitability that the viewer doesn’t realize until the action is over - the barn scene, for example, is very well written - but there are better films for representing this period of American history.

Soothing!

Reallyb liked it

Very good

only interested in western cowboy movies