Rebel in Town (1956)

So much average

From my favorite movies..

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Rebel in Town" was an unusual low budget western for its time. It contains two graphic scenes which were not normally seen in the westerns of the day.Following the Civil War, John Willoughby (John Payne) and his wife Ruth (Ruth Roman) and son Peety (Bobby Clark) live on a small ranch where Peety likes to play soldier (Union of course). A gang of ex-Confederates is roaming the area robbing banks in order to survive.The gang is led by Bedloe Mason (J. Carroll Naish) who along with his four sons: Gray (Ben Cooper), Wesley (John Smith). Frank (Ben Johnson) and Cain (Sterling Franck) is looking for its next score.One day Frank Wesley and Gray ride into town for water. Young Peety, who has just received a pair of cap pistols for his birthday, sneaks up behind the men and is shot (in a gruesome realistic scene) by the trigger happy Wesley. Wesley and Frank flee but Gray is shocked and feels remorse, but he too is forced to flee.Willoughby and his wife are devastated by their loss and he vows revenge on the killers. Back in the rebel camp dissension among the gang develops as Gray decides to leave and go back to town to see if the young boy was killed or not and to try to atone for the tragedy on behalf of his family.Before he can go, Wesley confronts him, stabs him in the back and takes Gray's share of the loot. Believing Gray dead, Wesley ties him to his horse and drives them off. Willoughby comes upon the wounded Gray and takes him home to be treated for his wound unaware that Gray is one of the gang who murdered his son. But Ruth had met Gray briefly on that fateful day and recognizes him.Eventually, Willoughby finds out who Gray really is and becomes enraged to the point of taking an ax to him only to be stopped by Ruth. Gray tries to convince Willoughby of his remorse and desire to return to town to take his medicine. The two proceed to town where Gray is immediately arrested by Sheriff Adam Russell (James Griffith). A lynch mob forms led by Willoughby but the Masons arrive and......................................................John Payne, in my opinion, gives one of his best performances as the vengeful father out to bring down his son's killer(s). The scene where he attempts to take an ax to Cooper is unexpected. He goes from a peace loving farmer to a man filled with hate seamlessly. Ruth Roman is also good as the wife who tries to clam her husband down in spite of her own sorrow.J. Carrol Naish, complete with southern accent, makes a fearful leader of the confederates. Ben Cooper also stands out as the sympathetic and remorseful Gray. John Smith as the trigger happy "Cain like" brother also stands out. Unfortunately, Ben Johnson, whose performances I always personally liked, has little to do in this one. Sterling Franck, for some reason, is billed as his character Cain Mason. Watch for sagebrush veteran Kermit Maynard as a Deputy.Great cast, grim humorless story well mounted.

Small scale western that holds together well despite unoriginal situations and a low budget.Most of that can be attributed to the lean direction by the little known Werker and the competence of the players. John Payne is brooding and bitter in the lead occasionally going overboard with with the righteous indignation but by and large he does well. Ben Cooper is also solid as a conscious stricken young man but it's Ruth Roman who stands out with a well balanced performance as Nora Payne, weighted down with grief but compassionate enough to remain clear eyed and level headed while all around her are losing theirs.Another asset of the film is the use of natural sounds to underscore scenes adding to their import without a lot of intrusive musical cues.No prize winner but a better than average western.

When an Ex-Confederate patriarch and his four sons stop for supplies on the run after robbing a bank, one of them gets nervous hearing a cocked pistol behind him and turns quickly, blasting a 9 yr old boy playing with a toy pistol. The murder of the child spawns hate and a blind rage for vengeance in the small western town. J. Carroll Naish has one of his best roles as the Bible-spouting sire of a brood of scum, trying to keep them in order. John Payne as the traumatized father of the dead boy gives an unnerving performance as a decent man who's become emotionally unbalanced. His uncertainty and mental disruption are almost palpable as his alarmed wife (Ruth Roman) desperately tries to stifle his increasingly homicidal personality. It's very unsettling to see Payne in this unheroic light...the difference from his usual demeanor draws a very convincing portrait of a severely unbalanced man. Ben Cooper (who usually plays a disturbed role) is uncommonly sympathetic here as the only member of the gang responsible enough to acknowledge guilt for the tragedy, even though his own life is at risk instead of his older brother's, the unrepentant perpetrator. This is definitely several cuts above your average western and sustains viewers'interest throughout. Highly recommended....

Most Westerns use one of a limited number of standard plots, but it's hard to categorize this movie. Its setting -- a small frontier town -- merely serves as a background for a drama of revenge and reconciliation which could easily be recast as a Greek tragedy. Its central question certainly rises above the usual concerns of Westerns: can the sacrifice of one man's guilty son make up for the death of another man's innocent son?Or, as J. Carroll Naish puts it in the last scene: "What the sons of some men do to the sons of others ... there's a tragedy of the world."John Payne, (sporting a mustache), gets top billing here but his character is absent from many of the movie's key scenes. Ben Cooper actually plays the main character as his feelings of guilt over the death of an innocent boy propels most of the plot. Ruth Roman seems miscast as a frontier wife and mother. The less said about the two juvenile performers, (Bobby Clark and Mimi Gibson), the better.There's a vivid flogging scene in the movie's second half in which J. Carroll Naish takes a whip to the back of his son, John Smith, who's tied shirtless to a tree. This may be the American cinema's only major whipping in which a father strikes his own son.