Western Union – Der Überfall der Ogalalla (1941)

Western Union – Der Überfall der Ogalalla: Directed by Fritz Lang. With Robert Young, Randolph Scott, Dean Jagger, Virginia Gilmore. When Edward Creighton leads the construction of the Western Union to unite East with West, he hires a Western reformed outlaw and a tenderfoot Eastern surveyor.

“No one ever really believed that Randolf Scott was a gun toter; he seemed too gentle for that. But the veneer of respectability he gave to his roles helped reinforce the western morality of good superceding evil. Nowhere is this poetry more evident as in Western Union [1941], directed by one of film noiru0026#39;s most gifted geniuses Fritz Lang, here working equally adeptly in colour. The shot of unfinished telegraph lines snaking away into twilight oblivion leaves lasting impressions.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThis western prophecies the long professional relationship between producer Nat Holt and Randolf Scott which ran from 1946 and turned out cliché-westerns which werenu0026#39;t cliches at the time, and which, with practice improved till there was a kind of visual poetry about them. This isnu0026#39;t the history of Western Union, the way the western isnu0026#39;t the history of the old west. But it seems to relate a kind of truth, and thatu0026#39;s what matters.”