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Barbara Stanwyck (STELLA DALLAS) stars as Jessica Drummond, a rancher who runs her Arizona cattle ranch with an iron hand and a private army of 40 hired guns. The tough-as-nails matriarch has a troublesome brother whom she nonetheless dotes on, and when he shoots the sheriff she comes to his aid, unable to say no. This instigates an all-out war, which is further complicated by the fact that the new Marshall, Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) falls hard for Jessica, and she returns his feelings. A gem from auteur Samuel Fuller (THE BIG RED ONE) that reads as a noir dressed as a western, the film ingeniously invokes genre tropes to investigate the intricacies of sex and love; its conclusions are less than optimistic, but the film retains a fascinating, almost surreal allure.
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