Poor old Ben Johnson!


That after having been in George Steven's "Shane" where he had a memorable fist fight with Alan Ladd, and later becoming one of Sam Peckinpah's fetish actors, he ended up in this mess.
When dear old Ben turns up as the conductor, I nearly cried. He looks so old and haggard, and he was only 62! His face looks like a mixture of Ray Milland and Jack Palance in their last years.
And the film is so boring, and so dark for half of the time that you can barely see what is going on. I nearly fell asleep on it.

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Johnson was as much of a cowboy in real life as he was in movies...you tend to get a little weather beaten. And Johnson was a fan of Roger Spottiswoode's work as an editor...he took this without looking at the script. And this probably met his bare minimum for doing a movie...no bad language or gratuitous sex. He was as much of a rancher and property developer in real life at that time as he was an actor and prospering at both...he didn't NEED to do this.

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