Robert J. Maxwell Although this widescreen color production avoids few clichés of the 1950s Western, it's still diverting in its small way. The opening credits proclaim the film's historical accuracy. Actually, it's not that accurate -- not according to the entry on Wikipedia anyway -- but it sticks closely enough to real events. You can tell because an entirely fictional movie would have one climax, usually a shoot out. And there IS a shoot out here, after undercover agent Randolph Scott arranges for the gang to be ambushed during a trait robbery, but it's followed by still another climax, five minutes later, in which the surviving gang members are lynched.No doubt the Reno brothers were unkempt miscreants. They don't joke, laugh, or have fun. Their faces are sour masks. They murdered and thieved their way through life beginning in adolescence. But the movie gets a bonus point for giving them at least some allegiance to each other that goes beyond the merely functional. They're like the Clanton gang in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine". They're unquestionably bad but they're rather more than incarnate evil.And they lynching scene gives them some additional dignity. They take it the way Saddam Hussein took it. Scott tries to stop the lynching but fails. In actual fact, there were not three but ten gang members lynched, in three independent groups, at different times. There was a national uproar over the mob violence, as there should have been.I don't mean to suggest that any of this is handled particularly well by the director. Neat photography and nice location shooting -- nowhere near Indiana -- but director Tim Whelan just rolls everything along on its formulaic track. The shoot out, for instance, is confusingly staged and fecklessly done. The characters shoot without aiming -- sometimes without even LOOKING in the direction they're shooting. Laura Reno, a real figure, falls improbably in love with Scott after the exchange of a few pleasantries. But what originality there is, is in the script, which defines the characters in ways that sometimes, very gently, nudges our conscience. Longfellow was wrong but he had a point when he wrote, "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."I wish some thought had gone into the title. "Rage At Dawn." I mean, really, couldn't they do any better than that? It's one of those generic titles. One size fits all. "Guns of Darkness," "Another Dawn," "Trapped." They should have let me have a crack at it. I'd have given them something that would SELL. "Agape and Malevolence in the Western Eidos." God, they'd come from hundreds of miles around to see a 1950 movie with a title like that. And they'd crawl all the way if they had to -- through the snow.

Cristi_Ciopron RAGE AT DAWN, directed by Tim Whelan, with a screenplay by Horace McCoy, features Randolph Scott and tells the story of a band of bank robbers, the Reno brothers; bringing them before the law needs a trick to be pulled upon them—a secret agent, played with relative detachment and some good—humor by the phlegmatic Scott, the legendary western lead, will become a gang member.Without being a bad movie, RAGE AT DAWN is representative for the unspectacular, even mediocre outings with which slightly uninspiring though essentially dependable western actors like Scott and Murphy are usually associated. Some notes here would signal to you the rugged, brutish and mean physiognomies of the Reno brothers—fact underlined by them always appearing grouped; some satire aiming at the small—town corruption; the essentially barren, austere, dry landscape. Now daddy Scott was a slightly low—profile actor, rural and average enough to let the movie go as it intends.

mike rice This is one of the non-Bud Boetticher Randy Scott programmers that Randolph Scott made. Even his bad westerns were a slight cut above most John Waynes after 1950 . I think I saw Lee Marvin playing a bad guy with no lines.Programmer or no, the cast makes its worth seeing: Forrest Tucker, J. Carroll Nash, Denver Pyle, Ken Tobey and Edgar Buchanan.In black and white Tobey could play the lead as he did in the Thing, because his red hair would appear dark. But in color films, his coloring won't allow him leads.Randy's a Pinkerton or Federal Agent trying to find out who is pulling all the train robberies. He and Tobey pull a robbery of their own to stir up the real train robbers. Forrest Tucker and his sister live on a working ranch near the town. Its a masquerade. The cowpunchers out there rob trains by night. Ray Teal is the sheriff, another familiar figure in western films. The gang are the Reno Brothers: Tucker, Nash and Myron Healey, another perennial bad guy, who would live to play a TV actor specializing in westerns on the TV show Fame. I believe Elvis, Richard Egan and William Campbell were the Reno Brothers in Love me Tender.Edgar Buchanan is the Judge. He and Teal and the prosecuting attorney are all getting pay-offs from Tucker and the train robbers.Meanwhile, Randy is romancing the sister, (Mala Powers) under the nose of her jealous and angry brother Tucker. As usual, those florid kerchiefs of Randy's anger a lot of he-men like Tucker, leaving them spoiling for a fight. But once the judge, sheriff and prosecutor realize Scott is "one of them," a thief, the Reno Brothers ask him to throw in with them in the robberies.Scott baits a trap to capture the Reno gang. But one of the Renos, Denver Pyle, wants him to get Laura Reno away from the gang before its too late. With no beard, Pyle is playing a 'normal' character for a change. The Renos are captured, but a gang of vigilantes comes to string them up right in the jail. Randy is unable to stop the hanging. Two former friends are arrested as vigilantes. Scott and Marla Reno ride off into the sunset together on a buckboard.

jamil-5 Any movie that has J. Carroll Naish as a cowboy can't be all bad (he's good) and pros like Kenneth Tobey and Edgar Buchanon have a certain "authenticity" that benefits a western. Forrest Tucker could be a good guy or a bad guy as the occasion demanded. Here, he's in his nasty, bad guy mode, pumping lead at people and even burning an informer alive. Tucker heads a gang of notorious robbers, including three of his brothers, that owns the corrupt lawmen of one Indiana county. In order to undo them, Randolph Scott, a resourceful spy, must be infiltrated into the gang. To complicate matters, Tucker and Naish's sister, who disapproves of their illegal ways, falls in love with Scott but is disillusioned when he appears to be an outlaw like them. Almost everything (there is a slight surprise at the end) works out as one would expect. Scott's presence carried many a mediocre western and, with interesting actors supporting him, it happens here but don't expect anything more than variations on a familiar theme.