Meanwhille, Marshal Lightnin' Tyrone is also after the gang; recovering from one raid, he meets femme fatale Opal Lacy, who may not be healthy for him to know. The screen play written by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman familiarly stacks the motivations and incidents and, unfortunately, blunts some picaresque possibilities. The damaged, vulnerable hero and the anti-hero are facets in the same persona and cannot be separated, even when the harm is physical as in The Duel at Silver Creek. This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.

The plot is pretty basic and doesn't live up to the suggestions of the opening – instead becoming rather focused on the actions of a few characters.The prettiest, Miss Domergue, not only dresses to the ears but, as one of the chief culprits, is not above garroting a wounded man to death. A half-hearted attempt to steer a little Western slightly off the beaten trail was unfolded with the Palace's new stage show yesterday.

The tropes and structure that he's working with here are certainly very conventional since it looks, acts, and is executed like a pretty typical Western of the classic variety. During the climactic gunfight where rider Rod Lacy is himself chased on horseback by the marshal and both then dismount to continue shooting at each other, Lacy astonishingly manages to fire 11 shots from what is clearly a revolver pistol (which normally fires only 6) before an attempted 12th shot reveals it to be out of ammunition, and only then is Lacy forced to reload it - he is out of frame briefly whilst on his galloping horse (the camera cuts to the chasing marshal) but could not have conceivably re-loaded during that very short time, and at no point throughout is he shown to be carrying 2 guns. When Marshall 'Lightning' Tyrone takes a party after the gang he leaves old timer Dan Music as Deputy of the town. A band of ruthless claim jumpers invade the local area and begin robbing, extorting, and killing miners who have struck it rich. Leonard Goldstein, the producer, has propped this routine affair against some average Technicolor scenery, and the commotion remains as pat and unsurprising as the kicked-up dust, which, in all fairness to Don Siegel's direction, is plentiful.six-shooter-filled minutes of a playful script bolstering the director’s sturdy craft and action staging, unabashedly embracing cliches to pack its runtime with noirish personalities and fast-paced law-vs-outlaw maneuvering.

But before the smitten sheriff manages to pin the goods on this cowtown Mata Hari, "Duel at Silver Creek" has frittered away as just another Western, loud and grim, with a stale corn kernel for every flying bullet. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. The Duel at Silver Creek dramatizes the perils of personal isolation and infirmity, conditions likely to prove fatal to the forces of evil. The Duel at Silver Creek is a 1952 American Western film directed by Don Siegel; his first film in the Western genre.

Luke manages to find out that the marshal's girlfriend is really one of the gang and exposes her and her brother as the real killers.