JohnHowardReid Copyright 21 April 1950 by Showtime Properties, Inc. Filmed on locations in Mexico and at Republic Studios, Hollywood. Released through RKO Radio Pictures. New York opening at the Rivoli: 21 May 1950. U.S. release: 8 April 1950. U.K. release: 26 June 1950. Australian release: 21 July 1950. 8,173 feet. 91 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Oil company employee mistakes innocent man for a bandit.COMMENT: Niven Busch (Duel in the Sun, Pursued) made this movie with his own money. Generally it's an interesting and creditable effort, though it does have a few odd shortcomings. That normally reliable player Victor Jory gives a mechanical and unconvincing performance, and there are moments in the script when the circumlocutions of the dialogue become too repetitious and predictable to sustain interest. Fortunately these moments are few and Mr Jory's part is small. Perhaps it could also be argued that Mr Busch has attempted to crowd too many elements into his script. On the credit side, however, he has plotted some intriguing and original twists into this Mexican western. And he and director John Sturges, assisted by cinematographer Edward Cronjager, have filmed the story against appropriately atmospheric, striking backgrounds.Lew Ayres does plausibly by the part of the tortured hero, whilst Miss Wright is likewise convincing in an equally difficult role. Jacqueline White, the unforgettable heroine of the later The Narrow Margin, has a rather different role here. After an elaborate introduction, she drops out to make room for the Teresa Wright character. Barry Kelley is perfectly cast as the heavy, whilst Milton Parsons makes the most of his two limited opportunities.All in all, The Capture emerges as a compelling thriller with strikingly film noirish location production assets.

DigitalRevenantX7 Former oil manager turned rancher Lindley Vanner is holed up in a Mexican priest's home with the Mexican police surrounding it – a fugitive from the law for murder. He tells his story to the priest. Vanner was working on a Mexican oil field in 1937 when he sets out to track down the bandit accused of stealing his company's payroll. He corners the suspect but accidentally shoots him dead due to miscommunication. Overcome with grief, he quits his job & heads to the dead man's town for a change of scenery. Bluffing his way into the widow's home, he tries to make amends by taking on various repair jobs on the ranch. The widow discovers his true identity but falls in love with him anyway. The pair get married. But when Vanner discovers that his victim was in fact innocent & had actually survived the gunshot wound he inflicted, killed instead by a guard who was the real thief during interrogation, Vanner attempts to track the real thief down & get him to confess. He succeeds in finding the culprit but again kills him in self defence. Now he is wanted by the Mexican police.The Capture is a modern-day (for the time) Western made at a time when the genre was getting stuck in the routine of the times & was getting more & more mediocre. It wasn't until the Italians got involved that the genre received a much-needed boost.The film is essentially about the emotional impact that killing someone – particularly by somebody who wasn't a soldier or police officer – inflicts on the person who does the killing. The death is accidental but the person is stuck with an emotional scar of that very act that compels them (well, most of the time) to make amends, well, if the person is honest & has morals, that is (most murderers these days tend to regard themselves in the right or have some severe mental defects that make them immune to grief). It is because of this plot angle that I rank the film as "mediocre" instead of "disappointing" since the rest of the film is almost sunk by poor writing. The idea of making the hero an everyday working stiff is a mediocre idea because the reason people go to the movies to watch is because they want to see larger-than-life characters or interestingly complex & unusual characters, not ordinary people who don't have anything to offer for them. Cinema is at its heart a medium of pure escapism (which is why I prefer science fiction & horror films over mediocre Westerns such as this) & films like The Capture don't do much to add to that medium – instead they detract & waste resources. The actors do a decent job of inhabiting their roles but are wholly unremarkable. Plus, the film tends to get boring in the middle section with Lew Ayres & Teresa Wright interacting – their characters loathe each other but very quickly fall in love in another of those old-fashioned Instant Romances, only to find their marriage threatened by the exposure of the fact that the dead husband was innocent of the crime that ultimately killed him. Ayres' transition from everyday Joe to tough guy is a bit unrealistic, although he acquits himself admirably.

Rainey Dawn I got this film from the Dark Crimes 50-pack collection: It is not what I would call a "Dark Crime" film... this is a western. If this film is a "dark crime" then so are all other westerns.The film is just okay. Nothing special to see here. It's told in flashback from our oil man cowboy to the priest. It's about a guy that runs an oil field, someone took some money that they were suppose to pay the workers with and one man is blamed for doing it. So our oil man who dubs as a cowboy goes after the guy, shoots the guy to quickly and the guy slowly bleeds to death internally. Next our oil cowboy sees a woman, falls for her the moment he sees her, finds out it's the dead man's wife and he goes after her. She is running a ranch and runs an ad in the paper for help since her husband is dead - and she hires the oil man cowboy to help her. Long story short, they marry - then he is on the run again for the murder of her dead husband, blah blah blah, more stuff happens and he ends up with a priest and the law after him and ends up a in a shoot out at the priest's place.Really not a all that bad of a film but it's not all that great either.3/10

mstomaso Eleven years into his lengthy career (1938/9-1976) the great western director (Magnificent Seven, Bad Day at Black Rock) John Sturges was releasing four films per year. The Capture was one of his better 1950 products. Sturges was still searching for his niche, but he would find it later in the decade as the popularity of noir and other genres of the World War II era faded. Although far from a straightforward western, The Capture is set in early 20th century Mexico and is a nice example of solid western storytelling by Niven Busch (The Postman Always Rings Twice). The lead character, a middle-management everyman (Lin Vanner) played by Lew Ayres, is a man running from his own self-doubt and an inexplicable guilt complex. Early in the film, he pursues and captures a man with an injured left arm who everybody believes to have been involved in a payroll robbery which resulted in the death of several security men. When the law comes to take this man into custody, he can not raise his left arm in surrender and is shot. Vanner escapes to a remote Mexican village to resurrect his life, and finds himself investigating the incident that set him at odds with himself after falling in love with the alleged culprit's widow. Going any further with the narrative of this plot-heavy, thoughtful, film would be a spoiler, so I will stop here. I will only say that the film's rather abrupt ending is worth the wait. Although The Capture's morality is rather heavy-handed for a western, this relatively dark film successfully explores psychological reality, conscience and the unpredictability of life in a way that would do most of the noir directors of the 40s and early 50s proud. Ayres and the female lead, Theresa Wright, do solid work in what must have been a tough, low-budget production schedule. And Sturges' direction and cinematography, though not particularly innovative, are entirely mature. Sturges shows what a good director can do with quality material and the right cast. And as his career developed, he eventually found his niche in films which are often seen today as landmarks of the western genre. The Capture foreshadows Sturges' classics nicely.