The Deadly Companions (1961)

THE DEADLY COMPANIONS  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Sam Peckinpah
    Brian Keith, Maureen O'Hara, Steve Cochran, 
    Chill Wills, Strother Martin, Will Wright
There's an undercurrent of madness running through this movie, which stars Brian Keith as a Civil War veteran called "Yellowleg", for the Union officer's trousers he's still wearing five years after Appomattox. Bitter, haunted and bent on revenge for a wartime atrocity that left him scarred in more ways than one, Keith has teamed up with two former rebels and gone into business robbing banks. An ironic and tragic turn of events brings them into the company of a saloon girl (Maureen O'Hara) on a journey deep into Apache territory. Peckinpah's darkly compelling first feature was a kind of bridge between the 1950s westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, and the director's own later work. (Peckinpah regular Strother Martin turns up as a preacher, and a shot of some kids playing in the dusty street as the outlaws ride by into town directly foreshadows "The Wild Bunch".) Keith's laconic, hard-bitten performance is a long way from the sitcom dad he played on television's "Family Affair".