Sunday | March 9, 2014 5:00 pm

The Violent Men

Screening on Film

Directed by Rudolph Maté.
With Glenn Ford, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson.
US, 1955, 35mm, color, 96 min.

The Violent Men rises to the top of director Rudolph Maté’s Westerns of the 1950s, for this film folds conjugal violence in the oneiric interior of a ranch with that of an implacable horizon of the high Sierra beyond the familiar lands about Lone Pine. Crippled Lew Wilkison (Edward G. Robinson), hardly little Caesar, is nearly immolated at the hands of his evil spouse Martha (Barbara Stanwyck), whose movement through the area of the ranch converts the Western into a reflection on the nature of the space it inherits and reinvents.