During the fight that ensues in the corral at Bannon's and Bishop's first confrontation, Bannon hits Bishop into a hitching rail which breaks off.
The end of one post is seen to be cleanly sawed off instead of splintered and broken off.
The Tall Stranger is directed by Thomas Carr and written for the screen by Christopher Knopf from a story by Louis L'Amour. It stars Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, Michael Ansara, George Neise, Whit Bissell, Adam Kennedy, Barry Kelley and Leo Gordon.
Leo Gordon too often was given the part of a sniveling villain, but here he gets to show that his talent would let him play almost anything.Prolific, theater-trained Barry Kelley was on screen possibly more than in any other role, and did he make the most of it!
Peaceful Joel McRae is riding along minding his own business, stopping to share some water with his horse, when -- BANG -- the horse is killed and -- BANG -- McRae catches a bullet right in the retroperitoneal sac. Stunned, he falls, and sees a blurry image of a man emptying McRae's canteen on the ground.
Joel McCrae and Virginia Mayo appeared together in the previous decade when directed by the great Raoul Walsh in the seminal Colorado Territory .The movie under review here is not as good -even close to being -as that wonderful picture but it is a sturdy B movie Western that will give genre lovers a lot of pleasure McCrae is Ned Barton , a Union army Civil war veteran who is shot and seriously wounded when stumbling across evidence of cattle rustling .
I'm starting to become a big fan of Joel McCrea. He is a consistently entertaining western hero.
A pleasing Western, with a little more grit in it than is usually found in one of the 1950s. It starts with Zarata's brutally shooting of an innocent onlooker - the hero Ned Bannon - then emptying his water bottle and leaving him to die, Hardy's beating up his ranch-hand who didn't prevent his cattle being rustled, Ellen's (distant) nude bathe, and then her attempted rape - and she also has a "past".
"The Tall Stranger" is an enjoyable Cinemascope colour Western starring Joel McCrea. McCrea's work in Westerns is not as celebrated as that of John Wayne, Gary Cooper and James Stewart, but to connoisseurs, he is one of the masters of the genre.
The final phase of Joel McCrea's career was spent at Allied Artists, the renamed Monogram Pictures, where he did a group of good B westerns. The Tall Stranger based on a Louis L'Amour novel is one of the best.
When the film begins, Ned Bannon (Joel McCrea) is ambushed and shot. Before blacking out, he notices a very fancy gun used by the shooter.
