Brando’s sole directorial effort is a brooding, oddball western that hasn’t aged particularly well, yet is still an undeniable harbinger of the darker, grittier western tales that would come to dominate the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Brando’s mumbling performance as an outlaw hellbent on revenge against his former partner-turned-sheriff isn’t one of his best, he proves a capable artist behind the lens, although we’ll never know to what extent since the studio took the film from him and cut it without his involvement. I have read in numerous places that this is a visually impressive film (Brando’s fascination with duststorms seems torn straight out of Kurosawa), but I will have to take their word for it since the craptacular DVD I watched looked like a straight port of a worn-out videocassette from the floor of someone’s closet. A decent label needs to rescue this important oddity from the wasteland of public-domain home video. (DVD)